Hands-On with Perplexity Labs

A Complete Walkthrough of Generating an Academic Research Report in 10 Minutes

Origin

I hadn’t used Perplexity in a while. As you know, I recommended this tool back in 2023 and also detailed its academic search capabilities in another article on comparing AI applications for literature reviews. Back then, it was my favorite search tool.

Looking back, ChatGPT at the time had some clear drawbacks, like its inability to access real-time information online. But Perplexity could search for real information online, and that was extremely important. While it might not have been as imaginative or agile as ChatGPT, it definitely excelled at compiling professional materials and providing support with real data.

At that time, I particularly valued its academic search feature. After selecting the “academic” option in the chat interface, you could ask for recent literature on a specific research topic, and it would provide results containing multiple relevant papers, mostly sourced from professional academic websites like NIH, Semantic Scholar, and arXiv. More importantly, when you asked something like…