6 ways LeapSpace can help you move from curiosity to discovery faster

When we designed our research-grade AI workspace LeapSpace we had a clear goal — to help researchers achieve better outcomes, confidently and with greater speed.

And central to that ambition was answering a need that researchers shared with us back in 2019, when 76% told us they wanted integrated, end-to-end research solutions tools that provide support for multiple research tasks and access to cross-publisher content — all in one secure location. So that’s what we’ve built LeapSpace to deliver.

To help you get the most out of LeapSpace, this article highlights six ways researchers currently use the solution to advance their research. And to inspire your exploration, we’ve included sample prompts (queries) from multiple disciplines built to generate well-structured responses.

1. Review literature and stay current

Writing a literature review can be an overwhelming task. The volume of published research is growing rapidly, with more than 5.14 million academic articles published in 2024. At the same time, research articles are getting longer, making it hard to locate the information you need.

So, how can LeapSpace help you kickstart your literature review? When you type in your prompt, the system processes Scopus abstracts from 7,000 publishers, along with millions of full-text journal articles from Elsevier and the growing number of publishers we partner with on content.

You can access a useful snapshot of your area of interest via a summary response or get a deeper analysis with the Deep Research report. You can also ask LeapSpace to visualize results as a table or flow chart. These referenced responses can highlight hidden connections and guide you toward relevant literature for further exploration. And because LeapSpace content is updated daily, the most recent research is considered.

Leverage LeapSpace to help you:

• Identify the latest research in your field

• Compare your results to previous findings

• Design course material around key findings and important studies

• Explore different methodologies to determine the right fit for your study

2. Explore a new topic or field

More than 60% of searches on Scopus alone are linked to learning about new topics. However, when a field is new, it can be hard to know where to start — or even which keywords to use.

Because LeapSpace uses natural language search, you don’t need to understand domain vocabulary or build any complex Boolean search strings. LeapSpace responses are already easy-to-follow, but if you let LeapSpace know you are new to the field (as we do in the sample query), it tailors the response to your experience — a great example of how providing context can influence the output you receive.

Leverage LeapSpace to help you:

• Spark new research ideas

• Find synergies with your own research topic

• Align funding applications with topical research priorities

• Create collaboration opportunities

3. Synthesize evidence and identify gaps

Do you need to explore complex, open or multidisciplinary questions? Deep Research can help reduce the labor of first-pass scoping. This feature considers up to 300 sources and uses a sophisticated AI agent to synthesize and interpret findings across sources sophisticated meta-analysis agent to interpret the findings.

As a result, the multi-page report that Deep Research generates can identify contradictions and infer potential connections across disciplines. Importantly, Deep Research can expose the negative space — where fields overlap but understanding has yet to catch up.

Two new features further help with this use case.

• Claim Radar highlights how a claim in a LeapSpace response aligns with other published papers, identifying the sources that support, contradict, or have a mixed response. This helps you to contextualize the response in the greater research landscape.

• Our new file upload functionality enables you to upload PDF, DOCX, TXT and CSV files to LeapSpace. The system will blend your additional content with its knowledge base of abstracts and full text from Elsevier and other scholarly publishers, so that responses are grounded in both, enriching analysis. You can also upload your own research and ask LeapSpace to help identify potential gaps in the literature you’ve yet to address.

Leverage LeapSpace to help you:

• Confirm whether there are key research articles you have missed

• Identify which articles support your thinking — and which don’t

• Look for research areas with growth potential

• Refine your research question

4. Validate claims and evidence strength

There are understandable concerns in academia about ‘black box’ AI tools. These systems don’t explain how they work or the content they use, which has implications for research integrity. LeapSpace is designed in line with our Responsible AI principles, which champion transparency and accountability. That’s why it includes features to help you calibrate the strength and relevancy of responses. For example:

• LeapSpace shares the steps it takes to respond to queries on screen so you can track each action, tool and content source used.

• If LeapSpace identifies consensus or strong disagreements in the material retrieved, it may add a “Confidence level” paragraph to the response, explaining how confident it is that the sources used are relevant.

• When LeapSpace does make a claim or assertion, at least one reference is always required.

• Clicking on a reference opens a Link to Statement, or “Trust Card”, which explains how closely that claim aligns with the underlying source. This helps you evaluate why a source was cited, surfacing contradictions and helping researchers calibrate the strength of the evidence and confidently make informed decisions.

• Claim Radar will build on the confidence signals offered by the Trust Card by highlighting how the claim aligns with the wider published literature. This will provide context to help you determine when an AI insight conflicts with the general consensus.

Leverage LeapSpace to help you:

• Reduce the time you spend on evaluating sources

• Build confidence in the literature you are citing

• Identify potential hallucinations

5. Explore across disciplines

The peer-reviewed content that LeapSpace draws on covers hundreds of disciplines, enabling it to respond to queries from a wide variety of fields and domains. Scopus alone currently indexes content from 330 disciplines, including the humanities. LeapSpace is also a valuable ally for exploring across disciplinary borders. That’s partly because of the natural language search we’ve already touched upon, but it’s also due to how LeapSpace works.

• LeapSpace blends keyword search with semantic (vector) search — even when identifying authors in your field. This means it looks for the content and people that most closely reflect your intent, not exact matches.

• Results are ranked based on relevancy with a small boost for recency, so the content that best matches your query is prioritized — regardless of discipline or publisher.

Leverage LeapSpace to help you:

• Tackle complex problems more effectively

• Strengthen funding applications

• Build new collaborations

• Amplify research impact

6. Find funding opportunities

Researchers say identifying relevant funders or grants is the most challenging task in the grant application process.

Have you found a promising research area using LeapSpace? The Find Funding tool makes it easier to explore open grants in that space — just type in a follow-up question along the lines of “what are the funding opportunities for this topic?” You can also add a request to limit the search to a country of your choice. LeapSpace shows you the relevant opportunities and funders, along with the grant amounts and eligibility criteria. There’s also a link to the relevant award page on the funder’s site.

LeapSpace has access to 36,000+ active and recurring funding opportunities from 16,000+ government and private funding organizations. Current coverage is strongest in North America, the UK, Australia, and the EU, but we are working to further expand our coverage globally.

Leverage LeapSpace to help you:

• Identify the most promising matches to your area of research

• Surface smaller, harder-to-find opportunities

Coming soon

Work is already underway to add new features, content and support for additional workflow tasks through 2026. For example:

• LeapSpace’s full text coverage will continue to expand as we build more content partnerships with other leading academic publishers and societies.

• The number of file formats supported by the file upload feature will increase.

• A new Compare tool will build on ScienceDirect AI’s popular Compare Experiments feature by providing structured evidence comparison across papers.

• Greater personalization and retained preferences will save you time and streamline searches.

• Smart AI notifications will keep you up to date with new developments in your field.