Research Discovery Lab
Classroom tool
The Research Discovery Lab is a follow-along exercise for a talk on making research easier to find. Its stations match the talk's sections: the author records that identify you, closing the loop between a profile and a website, the crawling and indexing checks, AI crawler access as a decision taken separately from search visibility, explaining the ideas behind the papers, testing the route with an assistant, and keeping the record coherent afterwards.
Nothing in it is required. Every task can be skipped, a whole station can be skipped in one click, and no field has to be filled in. What someone types — an ORCID iD, a Google Scholar id, their site — is used to build direct links into their own records, including the OpenAlex lookup that goes through the ORCID rather than the name, which is the one that finds an author entity holding somebody else's work. A link whose field is still empty is shown dashed and names the field it needs.
Everything is computed in the browser on the device that opens the page, and what is typed is kept in that browser. The page sets a Content-Security-Policy whose connect-src is 'self' and whose form-action is 'none', so the page has no route to another origin.
Using the lab
Fill in as much of the details panel as you have, work down the stations alongside the talk, and skip whatever does not apply. The summary button copies a short plain-text record of what you did and what you left.