Research diseases or parasites
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
An agent can find, read and summarise the sources this work depends on, and it can cover far more of them than a person would ever open. What it does not do is decide which sources deserve trust, or what the findings mean for your situation.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Research and retrieval work |
| Jobs that do it | 10 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Web, data and docs, Generalist agents |
| O*NET activity | Getting Information (4.A.1.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 10 occupations that perform it.
- Conduct experiments regarding causes of bee diseases or factors affecting yields of nectar or pollen.
- Develop or execute tests to detect diseases, genetic disorders, or other abnormalities.
- Investigate the relationship between organisms and disease, including the control of epidemics and the effects of antibiotics on microorganisms.
- Study characteristics of animals, such as origin, interrelationships, classification, life histories, diseases, development, genetics, and distribution.
- Evaluate, diagnose, or treat genetic diseases.
- Study reactions of plants, animals, and marine species to parasites.
- Investigate diseases or parasites to determine cause and risk factors, progress, life cycle, or mode of transmission.
- Evaluate effects of drugs, gases, pesticides, parasites, and microorganisms at various levels.
- Conduct insect or plant disease surveys.
- Identify groups at risk for specific preventable diseases or injuries.
- Study the mutations in organisms that lead to cancer or other diseases.
- Conduct research to develop methodologies, instrumentation, and procedures for medical application, analyzing data and presenting findings.
- Investigate cause, progress, life cycle, or mode of transmission of diseases or parasites.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for research and retrieval work, and what it costs.
Research is the one shape of work that needs no integration at all, so a single $20 assistant with browsing is the whole stack. Add a crawler only once you are pulling hundreds of pages on a schedule rather than reading a few.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
10 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Research biological or ecological phenomena”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.