Research Technology is Trapped in the Scholarly Silo: PR Can Break it Free

Research technology (ResTech) is an industry producing tools that are changing how science gets done. Yet its companies, founders, and marketers are telling almost nobody outside the scholarly publishing sphere about it.

Why so?

The sector’s AI-powered citation analysis and research identification, literature review platforms, manuscript integrity software, and peer review tools have millions of users, can attract substantial investment, and solve problems that researchers and institutions have struggled with for decades. However, they’re confined to the scholarly publicity silo, limiting their scope and impact. Thus, communications strategies surrounding those tools remain almost entirely confined to the audiences that already know they exist.

Why do ResTech’s communications largely stay inside the academic world?

What are they leaving on the table?

What can the sector do differently?

The development of these tools, unlike most publisher products, have a genuine story to tell to mainstream audiences.

The conventional PR industry perhaps has failed to embrace ResTech companies, while these companies, in turn, misunderstand, or are utterly in the dark about, the PR industry and how it works with tech companies. We’re trying to change this.

What research technology (ResTech) is, and why AI has changed its scale

ResTech comprises the software and platforms built specifically to support the research lifecycle: finding and synthesizing literature, managing and sorting submissions, detecting image manipulation, matching manuscripts with reviewers, tracking citations, and increasingly, using AI to do all of those things faster and more reliably than was previously possible.

Until recently, most ResTech companies served relatively contained niches within scholarly publishing, selling either to publishers or directly to researchers. changed when large language models (LLMs, like ChatGPT et al.) made it possible to process and synthesize scientific literature at a superhuman scale.

Tools like Elicit, Consensus, SciSpace, Jenni, and Scite can extract findings from thousands of papers, assess methodological quality, surface contradictions across the literature in minutes, help draft manuscripts, and suggest new research directions. Manuscript integrity platforms can screen tens of thousands of submissions for image duplication, statistical anomalies, and AI-generated text. Peer review matching tools can identify qualified reviewers across millions of published authors.

The AI boom didn’t create ResTech, but it compressed what would have been a decade of incremental development into a few years, and the user numbers reflect it: Connected Papers has more than 2 million, Jenni has as many as 8 million. Consensus has more than 10 million.

These are no longer niche tools serving a narrow specialist audience. They’re now infrastructure for how research and science get done.

The tools have don’t match the communications approach

Despite the great numbers, the scale and sheer usership of ResTech tools isn’t reflected in how the sector talks about itself.

ResTech companies are covered almost exclusively in fora like Research Information, STM Publishing News, and the programs of SSP and ALPSP. Walk those conference programs and you’ll find webinar series, community surveys, integration announcements, and partnership expansions that communicate effectively to people already inside scholarly publishing. These channels are inward looking and build the trust relationships that drive adoption within the sector.

These channels were built for publishers, scientists, and all adjacent parties – in a big and self-serving (and vitally so) scholarly silo.

What this silo doesn’t do is reach the journalists, funding bodies, university executives, and policymakers whose understanding of research infrastructure is shaped by what the mainstream press has written. These are audiences ResTech now has both the scale and the story to engage and attract.

Under-investment in communications is part of the picture. For instance, top-quartile B2B SaaS companies publish 10 or more press releases per year.

Most AI-native research tools? Zero to two. And those that do publish focus almost entirely on integration and partnership announcements, as well as within-sector expansions, rather than the broader questions their tools are helping to answer.

For many ResTech companies, communications budgets remain a fraction of what comparable software companies allocate, reflecting a founding culture that treats PR as optional rather than as part of how a company builds its public standing.

Why the scholarly silo formed, and why publishers don’t face the same problem

The communications culture ResTech operates in reflects the culture it grew from.

Academic environments reward peer-reviewed publication over public communication. The Ingelfinger Rule, originally designed to protect journal exclusivity, produced a broader instinct that communicating research-adjacent work to lay audiences signals a lack of rigor. Founders who came through academic careers absorbed those norms, and the result is a sector that has built sophisticated tools and then described them almost entirely in the language and channels of the world that produced them.

Publishers have operated in the same channels/silo for decades and, for them, this makes sense. Their primary audience – researchers, librarians, and institutions – is the scholarly publishing world, and that world’s channels are precisely where their decisions get made. A publisher’s PR circle closing back on itself is not a failure; it’s appropriate targeting.

ResTech, however, is in a fundamentally different position. Its tools now serve tens of millions of researchers, process billions of documents, and address questions – about the integrity of the scientific record, the role of AI in knowledge production, the reliability of published research – that mainstream journalists and their readers actively care about. The same communications approach that fits a publisher does not fit a company whose potential audience is anyone who depends on science being trustworthy.

What happens when companies in analogous positions pursue mainstream coverage

The B2B companies that have built durable mainstream editorial visibility have done so by giving journalists something verifiable to write about, connected to topics those outlets were already covering.

MagicSchool AI built coverage in NPR, The Washington Post, and EdWeek not by pitching its product features but by framing its story around teacher burnout and classroom time – questions those outlets were already asking. Named expert quotes appear more frequently in AI-generated outputs than unattributed claims, and MagicSchool built a bench of named educators who spoke to those outlets on the record. The coverage opened district-level procurement conversations it would not otherwise have reached, and built a public profile that shaped how administrators, parents, and policymakers understood what the tool was.

Pangram placed in The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and Slate by co-authoring a peer-reviewed study with researchers at Microsoft and the University of Maryland on AI detection in newspapers, then turning the findings into a news story. Coverage followed because the company gave journalists verifiable evidence connected to a question those outlets were already covering: what AI-generated text means for institutions that depend on written work. The coverage reached university administrators and policymakers who would never have encountered the tool through trade communications alone.

Both companies had the underlying evidence before a journalist wrote about them. What generated coverage was connecting that evidence to angles in outlets whose audiences extend well beyond the category’s existing user base.

ResTech companies produce that kind of evidence routinely – accuracy benchmarks, institutional adoption figures, integrity research, validation studies. The mainstream press connection is the step most of them haven’t taken.

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The mainstream audience that’s already waiting

Analysis of more than one million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity found that 82% of AI citations came from earned media in independent outlets – one measure of what mainstream coverage produces, though not the primary one.

The more immediate return is access to conversations about funding, policy, institutional procurement, and public trust in science that trade press doesn’t reach.

Research technology companies address questions that matter to anyone who cares about the integrity of knowledge: whether published science can be trusted, whether AI is changing who gets to contribute to it, whether the infrastructure supporting research is keeping pace with the scale of the problems it’s meant to help solve. Those are mainstream stories that connect to audiences far beyond scholarly publishing. The sector has spent years building the tools that could carry them.

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Adam Goulston (PsyD, MBA, ELS), owner of MacroLingo, guides scientific and B2B organizations on content strategy and AI search visibility, with a focus on Japan and Asia-Pacific. He has edited 3,000+ scientific manuscripts and authored numerous press releases, white papers, and other PR materials.

Gareth Dyke (PhD) works in publisher business development, with an emphasis on China. He has published more than 380 peer-reviewed publications, including in Nature and Science, and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Taylor & Francis journal Historical Biology. Dr. Goulston and Dr. Dyke both advise Singapore-based media relations firm Ellerton & Co.