Elsevier, the world’s leading scientific publisher, and part of RELX, believes there is another route to making AI tools safe for scientific research. Its new research tool, ScienceDirect AI, uses a closed system to train its AI model, meaning it only draws on ScienceDirect’s deep and verified database of millions of peer-reviewed research articles from Elsevier’s 3,000-strong portfolio of journals as well as those from other publishers.

Judson Dunham, Senior Director of Product Management at Elsevier, says ScienceDirect AI, launched in March 2025, aims to address the inaccuracies of other models and provide insights from trusted peer reviewed content.

“Our offering to customers as well as partner publishers is that we’re creating a safer way to benefit from this technology while minimising its tendency to making things up," he says. 

He continues, "we did not set out to make a chatbot over ScienceDirect. Instead, we turned the database of documents into a knowledgebase of insights and then use the LLMs and associated technologies to enable users to easily find, extract, synthesise and summarise those insights in response to natural language queries."

As with all ScienceDirect’s technological advances, researchers have been central to the development of ScienceDirect AI. The tool was created in collaboration with 30,000 researchers and 70 institutions, and in-depth design meetings involving product designers, researchers and data scientists were a key part of the process.

“It’s how we keep ourselves honest and focused, because we have customers in the room too” Dunham says.

A quarter-century of innovation

The new AI tool is the latest milestone in a rich history of innovation.

Launched by Elsevier in 1999, ScienceDirect was the first online library of electronic scientific books and articles. Today, it is the world's largest platform dedicated to peer-reviewed primary scientific and medical research and ranks as one of the top websites globally.

The numbers are big. More than 20m users access the platform each month. It hosts over 22m pieces of content from over 5,100 journals and over 48,000 e-books. In 2024, it published 751,000 new articles, a 17 percent increase on 2023. In the 12 months to June 2025, over 2.7bn articles were viewed and downloaded from the platform.

The platform also ranks highest in accessibility.

From the outset, ScienceDirect has remained at the forefront of emerging technology while upholding the highest standards of quality, innovating with the researcher experience firmly in mind. For example, the Article of the Future project, which began in 2009, enhanced pdfs of research articles by introducing interactive charts and allowing contextual information to be displayed in different viewing panes on the same page.

Another technological turning point came in 2014. “We completely re-architected the entire back end of ScienceDirect. It moved from this monolith to a very flexible platform that’s built on microservices,” says Rose L’Huillier, Senior Vice President for Researchers and Librarians Solutions at Elsevier. The overhaul also delivered a fast and improved search function that returns results in seconds.

2017 saw the arrival of Topics Pages, which provides useful summaries and extracts aimed at getting users up to speed with new topics. The summaries are written by subject-matter experts who use machine learning to mine Elsevier’s vast store of reference material for pertinent information.

As well as precise citations, the AI tool offers a reading assistant feature that uses natural language processing and allows questions in multiple languages. “This extends the AI chatbot concept of letting people interact conversationally with complex research topics at a corpus level, and instead brings it to article level,” Dunham explains. This allows users to interrogate a specific document or piece of literature. Another important feature is comparative experiment summaries, allowing users to quickly and easily compare certain aspects of studies, such as methodologies.

“What really resonates with people is the combination of summarising and synthesising… it’s this blending of discovery and reading that’s just totally different,” says Dunham.

Researchers say ScienceDirect AI’s features can be used to enhance scientific research processes and support new discoveries. “It can help you understand the historical, current and emerging trends and help you specify areas which are still niche, or perhaps receiving less attention from other researchers,” explains Dr Elsaid M. M. Zahran, an assistant professor in geospatial engineering at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China.

Developed with researchers

During its development, ScienceDirect turned to the 30,000 researchers and 70 institutions who tested the tool and provided feedback to refine its features and overall experience.

“Once we got the technology to a level of accuracy that we felt we could put out in the world responsibly, we directly invited institutions to use it. We would not have been able to develop this tool to a level of accuracy suitable for deployment without a steady stream of hundreds or thousands of people a month telling us when we got it right and when we got it wrong,” argues Elsevier’s Dunham.

Feedback from testers pointed to a 50 percent reduction in time spent on literature research. And researchers also say the tool gives them a better overall user experience than other products on the market. “When comparing ScienceDirect AI to other tools, it’s much, much better. Even though other tools can give you a longer output, the reliability of it is low. The chance of there being mistakes in that document is very high. But with ScienceDirect AI, everything is precise and accurate,” says Zahran, the geospatial engineer.

Research relief

ScienceDirect AI has arrived at an important juncture in the world of scientific research. Academics today are under immense time and workload pressure, and they are also expected to keep up with the reams of new scientific research that are published daily. Burnout, poor mental health, stress and anxiety are growing concerns in both corporate and academic research settings. Against this backdrop, automation tools have been welcomed as a way of alleviating workloads and speeding up productive research.

ScienceDirect AI seeks to address such issues by reducing the rote and tedious aspects of research and allowing academics to return to what excites them most: forming new hypotheses and developing projects. “Our focus was to make research fun again, because we know that the phase that researchers are in when they come to ScienceDirect is usually not their favourite. We wanted to find a way to make that more of a rewarding experience rather than something painful,” says L’Huillier.

Zahran says that ScienceDirect AI reduces the time spent simply staying abreast of new research. It can, he says, “quickly give you ideas about the latest trends and publications in your field… it allows me to chat with it and ask questions.”

For students and early-career researchers, literature reviews pose a particular challenge. “Many students fail to do their PhD or their master’s degree because they don’t know how to do it properly, but ScienceDirect AI has helped me guide my students with that,” Zahran remarks. The assistance the tool offers can be particularly beneficial for those who don’t have English as their first language. “It can help them improve their writing,” he notes.

The reduction in time spent on labour-intensive tasks can help support innovation and discovery, and improve researchers’ focus and productivity. “In academia, we have to publish a lot, and it must be very high-quality material. ScienceDirect AI gives so much detail, and it’s so much more precise than other tools that it is in a class of its own,” says Pires at Porto Polytechnic. He also notes that accuracy and reliability save a lot of time. “Whenever I use other AI tools, I have to spend a lot of time verifying what the tool provides,” he says.