We have released the first version of the Clarivate Academic AI Platform, serving our suite of AI-powered Research Assistants. Discover how it is going to help address the needs of students, researchers and librarians for trusted AI.
At ClarivateTM, we understand the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI) in the academic realm and the imperative to introduce AI thoughtfully and responsibly into research, teaching and learning environments.
Over the past year we engaged in several research projects, working closely across our data science, engineering, content and user experience teams and customer community to learn first-hand about the potential and the limitations of generative AI (GenAI). This experience, alongside years of using AI and machine learning in our products, enabled us to shape our path forward for harnessing AI and tailoring it to the needs of research and education.
Today, we are excited to announce the launch of the Clarivate Academic AI Platform. The platform serves as a technology backbone, enabling accelerated and consistent deployment of AI capabilities across our Academia & Government portfolio of solutions. With Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, document insights and metadata capabilities at its core, the platform ensures that answers and insights provided by Clarivate solutions are grounded in our extensive collection of curated scholarly content, including Web of Science Core CollectionTM, ProQuestTM full text resources, Ebook Central materials and the Ex LibrisTM Central Discovery Index.
The role of an AI Platform
The Clarivate Academic AI Platform is designed to tackle a range of challenges and help leverage opportunities across the academic spectrum. Here is how it transforms our offerings:
- Unified approach
Ensuring a common approach to how AI capabilities are deployed, scholarly content sources are used and how we safeguard security and privacy. - Accelerated innovation
By leveraging platform infrastructure, product teams can develop AI-based features in days — rather than weeks or months — bringing new innovations to customers faster. - Consistent user experience
Facilitating a common, intuitive user experience across Clarivate academic solutions, helping users easily navigate products, while preserving the unique characteristics of each product. - Integrity and quality
Employing rigorous testing methodologies to validate results for accuracy, relevance and interpretability and reduce the risk of misinformation and bias. - Expertise and best practices
The AI Platform team serves as a central hub of expertise, evangelizing the possibilities of AI and ensuring that our teams are at the forefront of AI developments.
Figure 1: The Clarivate Academic AI Platform
Technology backbone
The Clarivate Academic AI Platform leverages a suite of advanced technologies to enhance functionality and user experience:
- Semantic search infrastructure
Semantic search enables more nuanced and context-aware discovery, helping understand the intent behind queries. Coupling semantic search and keyword search allows us to provide accurate and relevant results. - Specialized APIs
We offer internal, task-specific APIs tailored for distinct product needs. For instance, APIs designed for extracting insights from academic documents can add valuable information to our records, which enables researchers to uncover insights, trends and patterns more efficiently. - Data integrity management
Addressing possible issues of misinformation stemming from the training data, along with security and privacy, is crucial. A centralized approach ensures that these aspects are uniformly managed and facilitates easy deployment of new products, upholding high standards of data integrity and user trust. - Centralized LLM gateway
Managing Large Language Models (LLMs) becomes more streamlined with the AI Platform, allowing us to use the most appropriate model for specific needs and use cases. This targeted approach ensures optimal performance and relevance of solutions. - Multi-Language support
To cater to a global academic community, the platform supports translation of AI queries into various languages, ensuring broader accessibility and inclusivity.
The importance of a unified user experience
By adopting consistent interface designs, graphic elements and interactive elements, we ensure that users can quickly familiarize themselves with these powerful new tools across Clarivate products for academia and government. This unity in design is not merely about aesthetics — it’s about creating a user-centered environment that helps users complete their research tasks with speed and confidence.
Figure 2: Clarivate Research Assistants UX examples (Web of Science, Primo, ProQuest)
Products powered by the AI Platform
Our broad investment in GenAI research is helping us embed AI wide and deep across our academia and government portfolio, with a range of solutions that are coming out this year and will continue to grow over time:
Web of Science Research Assistant
Helping researchers at all levels explore the world’s most trusted citation index – leveraging over a century of research – with natural language discovery, guided tasks, and contextual visualizations.
ProQuest Research Assistant
Enabling users to navigate millions of full text academic works within ProQuest and easily obtain new insights for research and learning.
Alethea Academic Coach
Nurturing students’ learning skills and critical thinking by guiding students to the core of their course readings, helping them distill takeaways and prepare for class discussion.
Primo Research Assistant
Transforming library discovery, providing users a new way to find and explore materials through natural language search, article references and recommended queries to support research.
Over time, the platform will expand its capabilities to support the introduction of AI capabilities into additional products, including AlmaTM, Ebook Central, EndNoteTM and Leganto® as well as present backend efficiencies such as metadata creation and enrichment.
Looking ahead
The v1.0 release of the Clarivate Academic AI Platform is just the beginning. As we move forward, we plan to roll out continuous updates and enhancements, working closely with customers and our newly formed Academic AI Advisory Council, aligned with technology advancements.
This platform marks a significant milestone in our effort to empower the academic community with innovative AI tools and technologies. Our commitment is to ensure that AI is used to enhance academic work while adhering to academic principles and the highest standards of ethical practice.
Interested in our Academic AI solutions? Learn more here.
