By Elissa Welle
Publication Date: 2025-11-19 21:50:00
Google has announced it’s testing a new AI-powered search tool, Scholar Labs, that’s designed to answer detailed research questions. But its demonstration highlighted a bigger question about finding “good” science studies. How much will scientists trust a tool that forgoes typical ways of gauging a study’s popularity with the scientific establishment in favor of reading the relationships between words to help surface good research?
The new search tool uses AI to identify the main topics and relationships in a user’s query and is currently available to a limited set of logged-in users. The demo video from Scholar Labs featured a question about brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). I have a PhD in BCIs, so I was eager to see what Scholar Labs pulled up.
The first result was a review paper of BCI research published in 2024 in a journal called Applied Sciences. Scholar Labs includes explanations for why the results matched the query, so it pointed out that the paper discusses…
