New capabilities of ProQuest Research Assistant enrich student interaction with documents

A recent Digital Education Council Global AI Student survey, What Students Want: Key Results from DEC Global AI Student Survey 2024, revealed that while 86% of students globally use AI regularly in their studies, over 50% were worried that over-reliance on AI could negatively impact their academic performance.

In response, ProQuest, part of Clarivate, continues to develop its ProQuest Research Assistant, an AI-powered research companion included in a growing number of solutions on the ProQuest platform. Developed in close partnership with the academic community, ProQuest Research Assistant delivers academic AI that puts quality, transparency and responsibility first, to give librarians the confidence that their students are using tools that can be trusted.

Accelerating Research and Improving Comprehension

New features respond to common challenges in the research workflow, including helping students understand the content and significance of documents, making complex works more accessible. Now, students will be helped by:

• • Article findings and conclusions
    Users now see concise summaries that highlight the core findings and conclusions from an article. Each summary is accompanied by links that direct readers to the exact text in their document from which the summary was created. These summaries encourage students to properly cite sources as they integrate them into papers and projects.
  • Essential details tailored to document type
    This feature presents a high-level overview of key document details, with the description varying depending on the type of content. For example:
    • For research papers, users will see details such as methodology, hypotheses and results
    • For news articles, they’ll get a sense of tone, sources and key facts
    • Deep links to the corresponding sections of the full document are included, allowing for quick verification and further exploration

These features save time, improve comprehension and support more confident, critical engagement with academic materials.

Coming Soon: "Chat With the Document"

Launching later this year, ProQuest Research Assistant will allow users to ask questions about documents and receive answers based solely on that document’s content. This "chat with the document" capability will support over 100 languages and continues our commitment to keeping AI grounded in high-quality sources and context.

Helping Students Use Dissertations More Effectively

The new features come on the heels of another advancement to help users critically analyze and understand lengthy dissertations. ProQuest Research Assistant is now available in ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, where it serves as a launchpad for undergraduates to explore topics and develop research skills, while it accelerates literature reviews for graduate students and faculty by identifying key references and connections across disciplines.

Designed For Transparency and Academic Integrity

ProQuest Research Assistant is powered by our Academic AI platform. The Clarivate Academic AI Platform is designed to tackle a range of challenges and help leverage opportunities across the academic spectrum, ensuring a common approach to how AI capabilities are deployed, scholarly content sources are used and how we safeguard security and privacy. Our AI works exclusively with vetted academic content and includes citations and source links.

As librarians’ role in teaching information literacy becomes more important than ever, we are committed to creating Academic AI capabilities that offer new opportunities for collaboration, instruction and support — helping students stay focused, critically engaged and ethically grounded in their research.

Click here to see videos of these new features and find out more about ProQuest Research Assistant.

Support students with world-class content and AI-powered insights. Request trials of products with the ProQuest Research Assistant to explore how AI is harnessed responsibly to help scholars work more efficiently and aid understanding of materials.