Aaron Tay's Musings about Librarianship

Deep Research, Shallow Agency: What Academic Deep Research Can and Can't Do

The Agentic Illusion: Most Academic Deep Research runs fixed workflows and stumble when given unfamiliar literature review tasks that do not fit them.

Dec 8 • Aaron Tay

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November 2025

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Servers - Wiley AI Gateway & PubMed - How Claude can now pilot test search strategies using PubMed

The Model Context Protocol may fundamentally change how AI tools access academic content. Rather than AI powered search engines building massive…

Nov 30 • Aaron Tay

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Scholar Labs Early Review: Google Scholar Finally Enters the AI Era

Generated by Nano-Banana Pro from text of this blog post

Nov 20 • Aaron Tay

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A 2025 Deep Dive of Consensus: Promises and Pitfalls in AI-Powered Academic Search

The recent addition of Consensus Deep Search mode is a great boost to its retrieval capabilities. On top of that, it has one of the most appealing…

Nov 15 • Aaron Tay

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ResearchRabbit’s 2025 Revamp: iterative chaining without the clutter

ResearchRabbit shipped its biggest update in years: a cleaner iterative “rabbit hole” flow, a more configurable citation graph, and an optional premium…

Nov 2 • Aaron Tay

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October 2025

“We’re Good at Search”… Just Not the Kind That the AI era Demands - a Provocation

I might be exaggerating slightly, but if you look at the few new evaluation matrices for AI-powered search circulating, “relevancy” is often just one of…

Oct 23 • Aaron Tay

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FORCE2026 in Singapore — Call for Proposals now open (extended 9 Nov 2025)

Also call for Sponsors!

Oct 19 • Aaron Tay

Implications of AI-powered academic search - Recorded Talk

Quick catch-up to what I have been writing and thinking about

Oct 9 • Aaron Tay

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September 2025

The Petrol Tank for AI Discovery Might be Running Dry as Publishers close access to scholarly content such as abstracts due to AI incentives

Elicit.com, Consensus, and Undermind.ai are among the new leading comprehensive cross-disciplinary “AI-powered academic search engines” today.

Sep 27 • Aaron Tay

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Google's AI Mode: It Can Out-Search You, But Can It Out-Evaluate You?

Introduction

Sep 7 • Aaron Tay

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August 2025

What Academic "Deep Research" Is Really For

Orientation, not copy-paste prose.

Aug 11 • Aaron Tay

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Why I Think Academic Deep Research — or at Least Deep Search — Will “Win”

Aaron hypes up academic deep research and explains why

Aug 8 • Aaron Tay

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