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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 1d

It's ironic to see 2025 publications talking about academic ai search engines saying things like Elicit uses GPT3 and Undermind.ai uses arxiv. (Might want to check if there are more updated sources).

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 2d

Sorry. All virtual seats for Mike's session are now over. But we still have seats for other events in this series. eventregistration.smu.edu.sg/event/TTT202...

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 3d

I realise I am very uncomfortable with agents and I've been thinking why (1)

Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 3d

Want to hear more from @mikecaulfield.bsky.social? Mike the creator of SIFT and co-author of Verified- is doing a free online class on using searching + AI for Verification. 24 October 2025 (Friday), 10:00–11:30 am SGT (UTC +8). eventregistration.smu.edu.sg/event/TTT2025/

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 7d

It definitely cant do things like find citations/references of paper x and... the thinking pretends it can but it can't . To be fair neither can undermind.ai etc. So far, I haven't found a acad deep research that is agentic enough to do that but modern general LLMs like chatgpt CAN do such things(2)

Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 7d

Playing more with Scopus deep research.. Looking at "thinking" & testing it looks like Scopus Deep Research doesn't have citation searching as a tool, unlike Undermind, Consensus Deep search etc. Looks more like it is generated various questions & choosing keywords to try to find content (1)

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 7d

Tried with the new Warden OpenAlex rewrite & the % with abstracts in Elsevier is higher but still below last year. I wonder - OpenAlex stores abstracts as inverted index, is that a way to bypass the issue? Technically the record does not have the abstract but you can still match text in abstract?

Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

[blogged] The Petrol Tank for AI Discovery Might be Running Dry as Publishers close access to scholarly content such as abstracts due to AI incentives aarontay.substack.com/p/the-petrol... - an analysis of OpenAlex abstract coverage changes for Elsevier & Springernature

The Petrol Tank for AI Discovery Might be Running Dry as Publishers close access to scholarly content such as abstracts due to AI incentives

Elicit.com, Consensus, and Undermind.ai are among the new leading comprehensive cross-disciplinary “AI-powered academic search engines” today.

aarontay.substack.com

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

That's interesting

Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

Hmm yeah i may misunderstand what this feature is meant to do. Will ask at our official webinar today

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

Another favourite question, can you use GS alone for systematic review, like scite assistant and a few others, Sciencedirect is tripped up by Gehanno(2023) because the first sentence of abstract is "it is said that..." though the paper findings actually say "could be used alone for SR" (6)

Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

[blogged] The Petrol Tank for AI Discovery Might be Running Dry as Publishers close access to scholarly content such as abstracts due to AI incentives aarontay.substack.com/p/the-petrol... - an analysis of OpenAlex abstract coverage changes for Elsevier & Springernature

The Petrol Tank for AI Discovery Might be Running Dry as Publishers close access to scholarly content such as abstracts due to AI incentives

Elicit.com, Consensus, and Undermind.ai are among the new leading comprehensive cross-disciplinary “AI-powered academic search engines” today.

aarontay.substack.com

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

Maybe I misunderstand how or what "compare experiment" feature is for, but it makes little sense to compare papers that are totally different in method and/or objective?!?! (5)

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

Some of it can be explained. e.g. Sciencedirect AI does a secondary cite on X and hence "thinks" that X is relevant, when actually X is on a totally different topic (just happens to mention results from truly relevant y). But some I really can't explain why it appears in compare experiment table(4)

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

The biggest disappointment is the "compare experiment" feature. Leaving aside you cant control the headers for comparison in many tests the top few results totally not related to the question? eg in this one the first two are not studies estimating size of GS! Why is this so? (3)

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

The generated answer here looks ok. That said the fact it searches full-text instead of just abstract means it more likely to do secondary citations similar to scite assistant.
e.g (Momodu, Okunade & Adepoju, 2022) is cited because it mentions the result from (Gusenbauer, 2019) (2)

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

Kicking the tires of Sciencedirect AI. (1)

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

in other words I like the grainularity of ASJC Subject Areas but I dont want to assign it by using the journal the article is in....

Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

SOS. I have Scopus & Scival, I want a way to categorise articles in Scopus. But I don't want it to use journal level assignment (ie all articles in x are in area y). I know Scopus & Scival have topics and topic clusters but they are too granular. What can I do? (1)

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

curious about whether review articles have higher %OA than normal articles and playing around with openalex, lens, the answers seems to be yes. But looking at just gold (include diamond)+hybrid, I not sure how much is really APC funded (yes i know Gold OA etc need not be APC funded).

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

Yes.I would say embeddings gives you "closest" based on the distribution of the data it was trained on. Most probable match is also another way of putting it , in if it is BERT the embeddings are trained using masked language modelling then it will guess the most probable word to fill (2)

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 8d

Reading hughrundle.net/did-you-mean/ and librarian.aedileworks.com/2025/09/20/l... and thinking about it (1)

Did you mean..?

Search engines based on embedding vector queries are fundamentally at odds with the goal of enabling multiple ontological mappings across information and cultural works.

hughrundle.net

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Reposted by Aaron Tay

Danny Kingsley @dannykay68.bsky.social · 9d

GEARING UP: Join more than 300 people attending our symposium: "Beyond Certainty – what does ‘Discovery’ mean in an open and artificially intelligent world?" www.deakin.edu.au/library/abou...
8 October 9:30am AEST
#AIBeyond2025

Beyond Certainty

www.deakin.edu.au

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 10d

Publishers used to be somewhat liberal about open abstracts but no longer it seems..

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 12d

interesting issue.

Ludo Waltman @ludowaltman.bsky.social · 13d

We need good practices for DOI registration for publish-review-curate platforms like @metaror.bsky.social and others.

@andre-brasil.bsky.social and I wrote a blog post about this: doi.org/10.64000/76j...

Together with @crossref.bsky.social we hope to receive input from the community on this issue!

Innovation in scientific publishing and its implications for Crossref DOI registration practices - Request for input - Crossref

Lots of exciting innovations are being made in scientific publishing, often raising fundamental questions about established publishing practices. In this guest post, Ludo Waltman and André Brasil disc...

doi.org

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Aaron Tay @aarontay.bsky.social · 12d

Nothing really in there i didn't already know except maybe the prices of apis. But it really reinforces the idea that Google has an overwhelming advantage in search and AI (which is search in a way)