AI for Scientific Search
20 comments
·July 3, 2025gavinray
andjar
A while ago, I started working on two R packages for creating 'living reviews': metawoRld and DataFindR, see https://andjar.github.io/metawoRld/articles/conceptual_overv... . You do the broad literature search yourself, but the idea is to use LLMs to select relevant studies and perform data extraction in a structured, reproducible manner. The extracted data is stored in a git repository for collaboration and version tracking, with automated validation and website generation for presenting results.
TechDebtDevin
"Structured and Reproducable"
AustinBGibbons
Check out https://elicit.com/
gavinray
Seems potentially useful, thanks! Only drawback I can see is the small number of papers provided by the free plan, but that's reasonable I suppose.
hugeBirb
I've been trying to tackle this exact problem. Current process is to use exa.ai to collect a wide breadth of research papers. Do a summarization pass and convert to markdown. Search for more specific terms then give the relevant papers/context to Gemini 2.5 pro and say give me a summary. Looking for very specific resources and to be honest it's been a terrible process :|
kianN
Linking to a nearby thread in case this is helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457928
tkuipers
I’ve found a lot of success with https://www.undermind.ai/ though I’m not sure it has the graph you’re looking for
gavinray
This also looks excellent, thank you!
kianN
I built a public literature review search tool for some graduate student friends that became pretty popular in the Santa Barbara area. It actually does exactly what you are describing.
It’s not neural network based: it leverages hierarchical mixture models to give a statistical overview of the data. It lets you build these analysis graphs via search or citation networks.
Example: https://platform.sturdystatistics.com/deepdive?search_type=e...
gavinray
This is genuinely incredible, tried it using a recent-ish paper on the pharmacology and mechanisms of the Androgen Receptor and my mind is blown:
https://platform.sturdystatistics.com/deepdive?fast=1&q=http...
null
whattheheckheck
Connectedpapers.com
dmezzetti
PaperAI is also an option if you prefer open-source: https://github.com/neuml/paperai
Disclaimer: I'm the primary author of this project.
mixedmath
From the title, I had thought that this would be a new tool for searching science, such as searching the arxiv. But this is actually a survey.
I quote the conclusion of the survey:
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In conclusion, rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly large language models like OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated substantial potential in areas such as logical reasoning and experimental coding. These developments have sparked increasing interest in applying AI to scientific research. However, despite the growing potential of AI in this domain, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys that consolidate current knowledge, hindering further progress. This paper addresses this gap by providing a detailed survey and unified framework for AI4Research. Our contributions include a systematic taxonomy for classifying AI4Research tasks, identification of key research gaps and future directions, and a compilation of open-source resources to support the community. We believe this work will enhance our understanding of AI’s role in research and serve as a catalyst for future advancements in the field.
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I jumped at this because I'm a mathematician who has been complaining about the lack of effective mathematical search for several years.
masterjack
Have you found https://sugaku.net/ useful? It’s focused on math research
Davidzheng
How do you view o3? I personally find it superior to google search almost always. Do you find that it often misses key references? (also mathematician)
fabmilo
I like zotero, I started vibe coding some integration for my workflow, the project is a bit clunky to build and iterate the development specially with gemini & claude. But I think that is the direction to take instead of reinvent from scratch something
bossyTeacher
AI for Scientific Search yes. LLM for Scientific Search I am not sure. AI is not equivalent with LLM. I dislike it when people do it.
AI will have a brand crisis once LLMs get abandoned and researchers need to explain the public that the new AI (not LLM based) is different than the old AI (LLM based) which is different from the old AI (GOFAI)
scientific_ass
Was expecting a product I can try out. But still, not disappointed.
I was hoping for this to announce a tool for research.
Anyone know of the best way to do something like:
"Find most relevant papers related to topic XYZ, download them, extract metadata, generate big-picture summary and entity-relationship graph"?
Having a nice workflow for this would be the best thing since sliced bread for hobbyists interested in niche science topics.
Recently found https://minicule.com which is free and lets you search + import, but it focuses more on "concept-extraction" than LLM synthesis/summary.