Skip to main content
Shipped 2026-05-12 · Bird Bird’s research reach just got significantly wider — and the way it searches got significantly smarter.

​
What’s new

Out of the box, Bird now searches eight open sources without any setup or connection step:
  • The open web via Google.
  • OpenAlex — the ~250M-work open catalogue.
  • Semantic Scholar — ~200M papers with AI-generated TLDRs, citation counts, and citation-graph traversal.
  • Crossref — the canonical DOI registry, used as a fallback and cross-check.
  • Unpaywall — finds the best-known open-access copy of any DOI so you can read the full text without leaving Bower.
  • arXiv — preprints across CS, ML, physics, math, statistics, biology, and economics.
  • Europe PMC — biomedical and life-sciences literature (PubMed + PMC + bioRxiv / medRxiv preprints).
  • ORCID — public publication histories.

​
Citation-trail discovery

Bird can now walk the citation graph for a paper you already know is relevant — pulling in both the foundations (papers cited by your seed) and the follow-on work (papers that cite your seed). It dedupes and ranks the results so the most-co-cited papers float to the top, and it resolves open-access PDF links automatically. Try it with prompts like:
  • “Starting from DOI 10.1038/s41586-023-XXXXX, find the most relevant follow-on work.”
  • “I’m reading these three papers. What else should I be reading?”
This is the single biggest jump in research quality we’ve shipped. Once you’ve got one or two papers on a topic, citation-graph proximity is a much stronger relevance signal than keyword overlap — Bird now uses it by default.

​
Why this matters

The bottleneck on a literature review is rarely “did the search engine find it” — it’s “did the search engine surface it in a place I’d notice.” Bird now reads laterally across eight sources, then ranks by citation-graph evidence rather than keyword match alone, so the papers that surface are the ones the field thinks are important.

​
Privacy

Everything Bird does here is gated by the Public sources toggle in the chat composer. Flip it off for any message and Bird won’t reach any external source on that turn.