Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Can Google Scholar Survive the AI Revolution?

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/19/2218...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nature: Google Scholar -- the
largest and most comprehensive scholarly search engine -- turns 20 this week.
Over its two decades, some researchers say, the tool has become one of the
most important in science. But in recent years, competitors that use
artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the search experience have emerged,
as have others that allow users to download their data. The impact that
Google Scholar -- which is owned by web giant Google in Mountain View,
California -- has had on science is remarkable, says Jevin West, a
computational social scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who
uses the database daily. But "if there was ever a moment when Google Scholar
could be overthrown as the main search engine, it might be now, because of
some of these new tools and some of the innovation that's happening in other
places," West says. Many of Google Scholar's advantages -- free access,
breadth of information and sophisticated search options -- "are now being
shared by other platforms," says Alberto Martin Martin, a bibliometrics
researcher at the University of Granada in Spain. AI-powered chatbots such as
ChatGPT and other tools that use large language models have become go-to
applications for some scientists when it comes to searching, reviewing and
summarizing the literature. And some researchers have swapped Google Scholar
for them. "Up until recently, Google Scholar was my default search," says
Aaron Tay, an academic librarian at Singapore Management University. It's
still top of his list, but "recently, I started using other AI tools." Still,
given Google Scholar's size and how deeply entrenched it is in the scientific
community, "it would take a lot to dethrone," adds West. Anurag Acharya, co-
founder of Google Scholar, at Google, says he welcomes all efforts to make
scholarly information easier to find, understand and build on. "The more we
can all do, the better it is for the advancement of science." Acharya says
Google Scholar uses AI to rank articles, suggest further search queries and
recommend related articles. What Google Scholar does not yet provide are AI-
generated summaries of search query results. According to Acharya, the
company has yet to find "an effective solution" for summarizing conclusions
from multiple papers in a brief manner that preserves all the important
context.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---
VRSS v2.1.180528