(21 May 2026) Much of the public conversation about AI in education centers on the risk that students will use it to avoid reading, outsource thinking or produce work detached from sources. Those concerns point to a related question: what changes when AI is designed to operate within scholarly content rather than around it?
A new report from Clarivate, How students are using Chat with the document, examines that question through observed student behavior in ProQuest Research Assistant. More than 470,000 unique users have used the Research Assistant feature on the ProQuest document page, generating nearly 2 million document level interactions. This scale allows for a meaningful examination of how AI affects student engagement with scholarly content. Further, the Chat With the Document feature has been available for more than six months, providing usage patterns and user feedback that reveal how students are interacting with AI.
The analysis within the report focuses on how students behave when AI is embedded directly in the document view, where reading, evaluation and judgment already take place. Results show that students who encounter Research Assistant features are more likely to engage with documents and act on them.
- When Research Assistant is visible in the document view, users are 31 percent more likely to scroll through the full text.
- When the feature is present, users are 40 percent more likely to take meaningful actions such as citing, downloading, saving, emailing or printing a document.
- Engagement increases further when students interact with AI-generated summaries: Users who clicked to view summaries or key takeaways in full were 76 percent more likely to take meaningful actions with the document.
Find out more from the announcement here.
