Search academic papers with Scholar

These instructions cover Bearly on the web and desktop, including the web app in a phone browser.

Scholar gives a chat a paper index beside Web Search. When a question should rest on research literature, Bearly searches papers, reads the passages that carry a claim, and cites them with superscript numbers. A paper-results card under the reply lists what it found.

Scholar is available on every plan. Your organization can turn it off.

Ask a research question

Ask in ordinary language, the way you would put the question to a colleague in the field. Scholar is a better fit than Web Search for scientific, medical, and technical questions, and for anything that asks what the research says.

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

Bearly decides when papers are the right source. During the reply you see Searching papers, then a count such as Found 8 papers, and often Reading paper as it pulls passages from the papers that carry the load-bearing claims. News, products, companies, and how-to questions still go to Web Search.

Citations appear as superscript numbers. On a computer, hover a number to see the paper: where it lives, its title, authors, year, and the opening of its abstract. Select the number to open the paper.

Read the paper results

The results card names what was searched and how many papers or sources came back. Expand it to see each paper with its source, authors, year, and field. Select a paper to open it.

The source tells you what kind of document you are looking at:

• arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv are preprint servers. Bearly says so when a finding rests only on a preprint.
• PubMed and PMC are the biomedical literature.
• A website name, such as a journal’s site, means Bearly found the paper through an academic web search rather than in the paper index. That search uses Web Search, so it needs Web Search available in the chat.

When Bearly reads a paper, the results card quotes a passage it read, when available. The step reads Read 1 paper · 3 passages when full text is available, or Read 1 paper · abstract only when the index holds only the paper’s abstract, which is common for biomedical papers.

Go deeper on one paper

Follow up in the same chat. Bearly can read a specific paper for a specific claim, or map the work around it.

Give me the exact effect size from the first paper.

Find later papers that cite or critique that paper.

Ask for follow-ups, critiques, or the prior work a paper builds on. To read a whole paper rather than passages, ask Bearly to read it; for open-access papers it can bring the full text into the chat as a document.

Turn Scholar on or off

Scholar is on by default. To change it for the current chat:

1. Select the sliders control beside the chat input.
2. Under Search, select Scholar.
3. Choose Auto or Off.

Auto lets Bearly use papers when they fit the question. Off stops automatic paper searches. To use Scholar for one message while it is off, type /scholar, choose it from the list, add a space, and write your question.

When Scholar is missing

If Scholar is not listed under Search, a team policy may have turned it off, or Web Search may be off for your team. A team administrator can review the assigned policy under Organizations → organization name → Policies.

Limits

• Coverage comes from the paper index: arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and PubMed. Journal articles outside those sources can appear through the academic web search, listed by the journal’s website, without passages.
• Full-text passages are available for many arXiv papers. Papers indexed only through PubMed give Bearly the abstract, so exact figures may need the paper opened.
• Ask Bearly to compare study design, sample size, replication, and recency, and to say where evidence is thin or inconclusive. Check its assessment against the papers.
• No papers found means the index had nothing for that phrasing. Rephrase or broaden the question, or ask for the web instead.

Opening a paper takes you to its source website.