A Cambridge professor took this challenge head on, developing two new AI tools for scholars
Artificial intelligence poses a threat to academics, because a specific expertise that was once very rare can now be produced through AI. In other words, academic scarcity is no longer quite so scarce.
But rather than being scared of AI, Professor Matthew Grimes of Cambridge Judge Business School has developed two new AI tools to help scholars – and especially junior scholars – get their research published in the top academic journals.
In August 2025 Matthew shared on LinkedIn a link to a new tool he developed – the AI-Powered Management Research Feedback Tool – which offers structured manuscript feedback.
“I built the tool based on my understanding of journals’ peer-review and editorial processes, and how AI should be critiquing manuscripts based on that understanding,” says Professor Grimes. “The tool does not predict whether a paper will or will not pass a peer-review process, but it does tell you that ‘here are some issues with the paper’”.
In January 2026, Matthew turned again to the question of how AI can devise the compelling and boundary-moving questions and answers that drive human knowledge forward in truly meaningful ways. The answer lies in identifying and solving puzzles.
“Too many research projects start from gaps in the literature rather than genuinely important puzzles,” says Professor Grimes, as such articles are initiated based on a supposed “gap in the literature”.
“There’s usually a reason that such a gap in the literature exists, and it’s because it’s not interesting to fill in that gap,” he says. “I observed that junior scholars were too often spending four years in an effort to get published in a top journal only to answer a very niche question that could yield just a tiny bit of knowledge. The right way to do research in the social sciences is to start with something empirically or theoretically puzzling – a tension in the literature or in practice.”
