Google has unveiled “Scholar Labs,” an AI tool designed to assist academic research.

It’s part of what appears to be an unending search for ways to make their AI useful.

They haven’t been that successful in the past, and I’m less-than-impressed with this new tool.

Google hasn’t completely struck out – their NotebookLM is a good piece of work, as is Gemini Storybook. Gemini is okay.  However, I have periodically found an obvious error in it and, unlike ChatGPT, it just won’t back down.

Here’s how they describe Scholar Labs:

Research questions are often detailed. Answering them can require looking at a topic from multiple angles. Today, we are introducing Scholar Labs, an AI powered Scholar search that is designed to help you answer detailed research questions.

It analyzes your question to identify its key topics, aspects and relationships. It then searches for all of them on Scholar, and evaluates the results to identify papers that answer the overall research question. For each paper, it explains how the paper answers your question. And includes all the familiar Scholar features that you depend upon.

You can ask follow up questions to dig deeper and explore specific nuances.

Scholar Labs is available for logged in users and currently supports questions in English. Click here to get started. You can view example research questions and ask your own.

Yesterday, when I tried to get in, it told me I needed to join a wait list.  Today, though, it appears it might be open to everybody?

I asked it:

What is the most innovative research on student motivation done in the past two years?

In response, it seemed to provide a list of papers that had “innovation” in the title.

I’m sure it will improve.

I’m adding it to The Best Tools For Academic Research.