Elsevier Launches AI Search, Summary, Comparison Tool for ScienceDirect

March 20, 2025

By Bio-IT World Staff

March 20, 2025 | Last week, Elsevier launched ScienceDirect AI, a generative AI tool for researchers that will extract, summarize and compare trusted insights from millions of full-text articles and book chapters on ScienceDirect. 

ScienceDirect AI surfaces insights from ScienceDirect, the world’s largest corpus of peer-reviewed full-text articles and book chapters. To ensure reliable insights that can be replicated, ScienceDirect AI provides clear links to sources of information and claims, including exact passages within research articles, offering the option to explore further. The tool is purposefully built to ensure accuracy and reduce the risk of hallucinations and biases. Users can transparently see how ScienceDirect AI reaches answers.  

ScienceDirect AI includes the following features:   

  • Ask ScienceDirect AI: Users can search using their own words to describe what they need and why. ScienceDirect AI will search across the millions of documents in its index to provide a Summary Response with references, Source Snippets for each reference, and short Related Insights summaries, linking back to the original document.  
  • Reading Assistant: This conversational feature answers questions about the content of a specific full-text article or book chapter and allows researchers to ask further questions of the document. Users can click on references within the summaries to jump to locations in the article where the answer comes from, it also suggests research questions.  
  • Compare Experiments: Comparing and synthesizing literature can be very time consuming. ScienceDirect AI’s unique Compare Experiments tool takes a set of articles and creates a table breaking down each experiment within them, drawing out the key aspects of each including goals, methods, results.  

More than 30,000 researchers and librarians from 70 universities and R&D intensive corporations globally helped test and develop ScienceDirect AI. Building on the feedback received, the tool can save 50% of time spent on literature research and help to enhance their research.   

ScienceDirect AI was developed in line with Elsevier’s Responsible AI Principles and Privacy Principles to ensure the highest standards of data privacy and security. ScienceDirect AI’s use of third-party LLMs is private, no information is stored or used to train public models, and all data is stored in a protected and private environment exclusive to Elsevier. ScienceDirect is ISO27001 compliant.