AI-powered scientific writing assistant introduced by Springer Nature

Springer Nature has announced a new AI-powered in-house writing assistant to support researchers in their scientific writing. The tool is particularly aimed at those whose first language is not English.

Curie, the assistant, has been trained on academic literature spanning over 447 areas of study, more than 2,000 field-specific topics and on over one million edits on papers published, including those in leading Nature journals.

It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with specialised AI digital editing developed in-house.

Unlike generalist AI writing apps, the company said that Curie focuses on the "unique pain points" of researchers in their professional writing. This includes translation to English, as well as English language editing to address grammatical errors and improve use of language.

The service was trialled with researchers in China, where 793 Chinese authors were given the option to use Curie at the point of submission in 2022. The results showed that of the 67% of authors who chose to use the tool, 90% saw their manuscript proceed to peer review, with a 14% increase in articles published at the end of the trial.

Eugenie Regan, vice-president of research solutions at Springer Nature, said: “By evolving our digital experiences to meet the needs of, and support all researchers, we can save them time, enabling them to focus their efforts where they can have the biggest impact – on the groundbreaking research that advances knowledge and propels society forward."