Elsevier, Wiley, BMJ Group, the American Physical Society, and Oxford University Press have joined a research initiative led by Kudos that examines the impact of zero-click search and AI-generated search overviews on scholarly communications.
The organizations are sponsoring the fast-track research study titled Taming the Crocodile, expanding a founding group that includes De Gruyter Brill, Emerald Publishing, IOP Publishing, Silverchair, and Springer Nature. The expanded cohort brings together publishers, scholarly societies, and platform providers to analyze how emerging AI-driven discovery tools are reshaping access to research.
The study focuses on the growing prevalence of zero-click search, sometimes referred to as “Google Zero,” in which users receive answers directly from search results pages or AI-generated overview panels without visiting source websites. Within scholarly communications, this trend raises concerns about declining click-through traffic as well as broader issues involving attribution, version control, research integrity, and trust in the scholarly record.
The initiative takes inspiration from the concept of the “Crocodile Effect,” a term describing the widening gap between search impressions and click-throughs to content sources. In a scholarly publishing environment, such shifts may influence how research outputs are discovered, interpreted, and cited while also affecting institutional subscription revenue models.
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