(14 Apr 2025) From Aaron Tay’s Musings about librarianship:
“I recently compared three academic AI search tools: Primo Research Assistant, Web of Science Research Assistant, and Scopus AI for a review article.
Why these three? Mainly because they are add-ons to extremely well-established academic search engines or databases:
- Primo: Owned by Exlibris (a Clarivate company), Primo is one of the four major discovery systems used by universities, often serving as the default library search box. It is also, the only one of the three bundled in “free” with Primo.
- Web of Science (WoS): Provided by Clarivate, WoS is the pioneer and oldest of the “Big Three” citation indexes.Scopus by Elsiever – Competitor to Web of Science and currently used in important University rankings like THE University Rankings and QS ranking.
- Scopus: Developed by Elsevier, Scopus is a major competitor to Web of Science and is currently used in important global university rankings, such as the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings and the QS World University Rankings.
(Note: Summon, the sister discovery service to Primo, also from Exlibris/Clarivate, launched its Summon Research Assistant last month. From all appearances, it seems identical to Primo Research Assistant, but I will not discuss it further here.)
I won’t delve into a full comparison of how these three tools are similar and different from each other or from other academic AI search tools in this post. Instead, I want to focus on the reproducibility and interpretability of the search results they provide.”
The full comparison is here.
