Ask what the research says

Scholar is available today in every Bearly chat. Ask a scientific, medical, or technical question and Bearly searches a paper index, reads the passages that carry the answer, and cites them. A Papers card under the reply lists what it used.

The problem with asking the web

Web search is good at pages about research and bad at research. Ask whether sleep deprivation impairs working memory and you get news articles, a university press release, and a supplement company's blog, each summarizing a study two steps removed. The paper is usually behind all of them, and the number you wanted is in a table on page six.

Scholar goes to the paper.

One question, start to finish

Ask the question the way you would put it to a colleague in the field:

What does the research say about whether sleep deprivation impairs working memory in adults?

Bearly decides that papers are the right source and searches the index. You see Searching papers, then Found 8 papers. It then reads the two or three papers that carry the load-bearing claims. Each read shows up as Read 1 paper · 3 passages: Bearly asked the paper a precise question and got back the passages that answer it, not the whole PDF.

The reply reads like a careful summary from someone who has the papers open. Total sleep deprivation reliably impairs working memory; one restricted night is less consistent; attention degrades before memory does. Each of those claims carries a superscript number. Hover it and you see the paper: where it lives, its title, its authors and year, and the opening of its abstract. Click it and the paper opens.

Under the reply, the Papers card names the search and lists every paper with its source, authors, year, and field. Papers Bearly actually read are marked Read, with the passage it relied on quoted beneath the title.

Then keep going in the same chat. "Give me the exact effect size from the first paper" reads that paper again for that claim. "Find later papers that critique it" walks the citation graph and returns the follow-ups.

What the sources mean

Scholar tells you what kind of document you are looking at, because it matters.

arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv are preprint servers. When a finding rests only on a preprint, Bearly says so rather than presenting it as settled. PubMed and PMC are the biomedical literature. A journal's website name means the paper came from an academic web search rather than the index, which is how paywalled journals reach the card.

Bearly does not rank papers by citation count or venue prestige. It weighs study design, sample size, replication, and recency, prefers systematic reviews and meta-analyses for medical questions, flags retractions and direct contradictions, and says plainly when the literature is thin. Finding no papers is not treated as evidence of absence.

Where it stops

Coverage is the index: arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and PubMed. That is most of physics, computer science, mathematics, and biomedicine, and much less of economics, law, and the humanities, where classic papers live on publisher sites. For those, Scholar's academic web search finds the landing page but cannot read passages from it.

Full text is not universal either. Many arXiv papers come with passages; papers indexed only through PubMed give Bearly the abstract, and the step says Read 1 paper · abstract only so you know the exact figure may need the paper opened. Ask Bearly to read an open-access paper in full and it brings the text into the chat as a document.

Scholar is not Deep Research. It answers in one reply, with the papers it found, in the time a normal chat takes. A question that needs a reviewed plan and a long report still belongs to Deep Research.

Availability

Scholar is on by default for every plan, on the web, desktop, iOS, and Android. In the sliders control beside the chat input, under Search, set Scholar to Auto or Off for the current chat. Typing /scholar uses it for one message even when it is off. A team policy can turn Scholar off for its members; it also needs Web Search enabled, since the academic web search rides on it.

The guide with the exact steps is in the docs: Search academic papers with Scholar.