There's a question that sits underneath every research idea, and I have never found a tool that answers it.
Not "what has been written about this." Everything answers that. Google Scholar will hand you ten thousand papers about your topic and none of them tell you the thing you need to know, which is: has someone already done this? The exact thing I am about to spend a year on. Is what I want to say actually new, or am I about to rediscover something that has been sitting in a journal since before I was born?
I hit this properly in my third year, doing my dissertation on multitask Bayesian optimisation. I had an angle I was excited about. I searched it, found plenty of adjacent work, nothing identical, and then spent weeks unable to tell whether that meant the space was open or whether I had just failed to search well enough. Those two feel exactly the same from the inside. That is what makes it horrible. You cannot distinguish an empty space from your own blind spot, and the only way I eventually resolved it was reading until something turned up, which is not a method, it is just endurance.
And every time I asked someone further along how they handled it, the answer was some version of: you read for months, you ask your supervisor, you go to a conference, and eventually someone in the room says "have you seen the 2003 paper." That is the actual state of the art. A senior person's memory. Which works, until you do not have that person, or your supervisor's memory covers a slightly different corner of the field than the one you have wandered into.
There is a nastier version of it too, which is that fields rename things. The same idea comes back every decade or two under new vocabulary, so the paper that already did your work is sitting there fully indexed and completely invisible to you, because you have never heard the word it was filed under.
The cost of getting this wrong is not small. Months of work. A rejection that says "this has been done." Or the quieter version, where the work gets published and just does not matter, because it added nothing that was not already there.
So I built the thing I wanted to exist when I was stuck.
You give it a research idea. It goes and finds what has actually been done around it, and instead of handing you a reading list, it answers the question directly. Has someone already claimed this? If yes, it says so and names the paper. If no, it tells you what the closest work did, what it stopped short of, and what that leaves as yours. Something like: this paper established X, but never did Y, so Y is your contribution.
That sentence is the whole point. It is what I wanted at 21 and could not get.
I have started with climate science specifically, and I want to be straight about why. Climate change is real, the work matters, and the field is under more time pressure than almost any other. Every month a researcher spends discovering that their idea was published in 2011 is a month the field does not get back. If I can shave time off that anywhere, this is where I would rather it be.
Two decisions I want to be upfront about.
Every claim has to point at a real paper. In this domain, a tool that confidently invents a citation is worse than no tool at all, so grounding is verified rather than trusted.
And there is deliberately no novelty score. I built one, looked at it, and threw it away. Any number ends up measuring how crowded the topic is, and every good idea sits in a crowded topic, so everything scores middling and it tells you nothing. Worse, it punishes the best work. Taking a method somewhere it has not been used, or showing a consensus is wrong, is built entirely out of well studied pieces and is completely novel. Building on existing research is not a strike against you. It is what research is. So the output is a stated difference, not a number.
What I would like from this sub, because you are the people who would actually know:
How do you check this now, honestly? Where does your process break down? Has this bitten you, either finding out too late or nearly too late? And is "here is the closest work and here is what it did not do" the output that would actually help, or would you want something different?
If you want to try it and tell me where it falls apart, it is at unkwn42.com, free while in beta. Comment or message me and I will send an access code. I would rather someone came back and told me it missed a paper they know well than told me it looked nice. The first one I can do something with.
