> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.bowerlabs.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Bird now reads across eight open scientific sources

> Bird now searches OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Crossref, Unpaywall, arXiv, Europe PMC, ORCID, and the open web — and can walk the citation graph for any seed paper.

**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](https://openalex.org)** — the \~250M-work open catalogue.
* **[Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org)** — \~200M papers
  with AI-generated TLDRs, citation counts, and citation-graph traversal.
* **[Crossref](https://www.crossref.org)** — the canonical DOI registry,
  used as a fallback and cross-check.
* **[Unpaywall](https://unpaywall.org)** — finds the best-known
  open-access copy of any DOI so you can read the full text without
  leaving Bower.
* **[arXiv](https://arxiv.org)** — preprints across CS, ML, physics,
  math, statistics, biology, and economics.
* **[Europe PMC](https://europepmc.org)** — biomedical and
  life-sciences literature (PubMed + PMC + bioRxiv / medRxiv preprints).
* **[ORCID](https://orcid.org)** — 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.