KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Scopus AI is a new generative AI tool integrated into the Scopus database.
• It promises to deliver fast and accurate summaries and insights for researchers while maintaining reliability and transparency.

On 16 January 2024, Elsevier launched Scopus AI, an innovative tool that merges generative artificial intelligence (AI) with the Scopus database. The move reflects a broader trend in the publishing industry to leverage AI to improve systems and services.

The decision to introduce Scopus AI stems from the recognition of the challenges faced by researchers, including information overload, misinformation, mounting workloads, and time pressures. The tool aims to address these challenges by providing deeper insights faster while ensuring the summaries it generates are trustworthy and transparent. Its key features and capabilities include:

• a natural-language search bar that allows users to pose queries in a conversational manner
• generation of concise, fully referenced summaries based on Scopus abstracts, helping users to quickly grasp the essence of a research topic
• suggestions for follow-up questions to assist in uncovering additional research insights
• a visual concept map for each query to illustrate how different research themes are interconnected
• a summary of the top researchers linked to each query along with an explanation of why each researcher was selected, drawing on more than 19 million Scopus author profiles.

Elsevier emphasises Scopus AI’s credibility, noting that the scholarly content it uses to generate summaries draws from 27,000 academic journals worldwide and is rigorously reviewed by an independent board of renowned scientists, researchers, and librarians.

Scopus AI aims to address [challenges faced by researchers] by providing deeper insights faster while ensuring the summaries it generates are trustworthy and transparent.

Since the launch of the pilot version in August 2023, Scopus AI has been tested by thousands of researchers whose feedback has led to the addition of a number of features, including the ability to identify leading academic experts in their fields.

Maxim Khan, Senior Vice President of Analytics Products and Data Platform at Elsevier, underlined the importance of supporting researchers in navigating complex topics and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration to maximise research impact. We look forward to seeing how Scopus AI might redefine the boundaries of scholarly exploration and contribute to the dynamic evolution of research practices.

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