AI tools for research can help you discover new sources for your literature review or research assignment by compiling information from large databases of scholarly output. These tools aim to find the most relevant articles and save researchers' time. However, it's important not to rely on a single tool for all your research to avoid missing important information on your topic.
AI-Powered Research Tools |
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UNDERLYING DATA |
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Connected Papers | Focuses on the relationships between research papers to find similar research. | Semantic Scholar database | Free with paid subscriptions available. | Connected Papers - About |
Consensus | Helps researchers find and synthesize answers to research questions, focusing on the scholarly authors' findings and claims in each paper. | Semantic Scholar database | Free with paid subscriptions available. | Consensus FAQs |
Elicit | Finds papers relevant to your topic by searching through papers and citations and extracting and synthesizing key information. | Semantic Scholar database | Free with paid subscriptions available. | Elicit FAQs |
Research Rabbit | A citation-based mapping tool that focuses on the relationships between research works. It uses visualizations to help researchers find similar papers and other researchers in their field. | Open Alex, Semantic Scholar, and other databases | Free | Research Rabbit FAQs |
Scholarcy | Summarizes key points and claims of articles into 'summary cards' that researchers can read, share, and annotate when compiling research on a given topic. | Only uses research papers uploaded or linked by the researcher themselves. | Free with paid subscriptions available. | Scholarcy FAQs |
SciSpace | Assists with academic research by providing access to over 270 million research papers, offering AI-powered explanations, literature reviews, data extraction from PDFs, and citation help. | Only uses research papers uploaded or linked by the author. | Free with paid subscriptions available. | SciSpace: How to use it |
Semantic Scholar | Provides brief summaries ('TLDR's) of the main objectives and results of papers. | Semantic Scholar database | Free | Semantic Scholar FAQs |
AI-Powered Large Language Models |
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ChatGPT | Assists with academic research by generating human-like text, answering questions, and providing information based on a vast dataset of text from books, articles, and websites. | The LLM is regularly updated. Logged in users can use ChatGPT to search the web. | There is a free version available. | OpenAI Help Center - ChatGPT |
Co-Pilot | Helps users with a wide range of tasks, including answering questions, providing information, assisting with productivity tasks, and offering support in various domains. | Copilot uses a vast amount of text data from diverse sources, including books, websites, and other texts. | You can create a Co-Pilot account via your NWACC Microsoft 365 account. | Copilot Learning Hub |
Claude | An AI-powered chatbot trained by Anthropic using Constitutional AI to be safe, accurate, and secure. It can be used in developmental stages of research for brainstorming and data analysis. | Publicly available information via the Internet along with licensed data sets. Data is updated regularly with each model version having a different cut-off date. | Free with paid subscriptions available. | Claude FAQ and Help Center |
Gemini | Designed by Google, Gemini is an AI-powered chatbot that responds to natural language queries with relevant information. As with ChatGPT, researchers can use Gemini to aid in topic development and initial source discovery. | Gemini can currently connect to the Internet. | Free with paid subscriptions available. However, you must create the account with a Google login. | Gemini FAQ |