Clarivate Forms Academic AI Working Group
Clarivate for Academia & Government has launched the Academic AI Working Group, an initiative inviting academic professionals to help shape the development of AI-powered research and learning solutions. The group aims to gather insights from the academic community to guide the creation of new tools, with a March 4 deadline to join.
- This initiative builds upon Clarivate's Academia AI Advisory Council, which was formed in July 2024 to provide high-level strategic guidance on AI. The new Working Group will be more hands-on, focusing on practical product design, user experience, and the implementation of AI guardrails. - The group will be composed of up to 15 academic and library professionals serving a two-year term, who will meet monthly starting in April 2026 to provide direct input on product development. - A key product the group will likely influence is Clarivate Nexus, an AI assistant platform that embeds curated academic content directly into AI tools used by researchers, designed to keep libraries central to scholarship. - Clarivate's technical approach to AI is built on a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, which grounds answers in existing scholarly content to reduce the risk of AI "hallucinations" and ensures attribution. - The company is also developing "agentic AI" capable of managing complex, multi-step tasks like conducting a full literature review by optimizing queries, analyzing data, and summarizing insights. - This move is part of a broader industry trend where AI is reshaping academic publishing by automating tasks like manuscript screening, plagiarism checks, and peer reviewer suggestions. - To accelerate its AI development, Clarivate has been active in acquisitions, such as purchasing the AI startup MotionHall in March 2024 to enhance its life sciences and healthcare data analysis capabilities. - Competitors like Elsevier (with Scopus AI) are also heavily investing in AI-powered research assistants, indicating a significant shift in how scholarly information is discovered and utilized.
