AI Research & Search

The important distinction in this category is between searching the literature and generating an answer about it. A tool that finds papers, shows you which one each claim came from and lets you open it is supporting research. A tool that produces a fluent summary with no traceable path back to a source is producing something that reads like research, which is a different and more dangerous product.

Coverage is the next question, and it is rarely advertised clearly. Which databases does it index, does it include preprints, and what happens with paywalled work - can it read the full text or only the abstract? A synthesis built on abstracts alone will miss methods and limitations, which is usually where the answer lives. When a tool extracts data from a paper into a table, spot-check a few rows against the PDF before trusting the rest; extraction is genuinely useful and genuinely fallible, and the errors are not random.