AI and Academic Use

For Researchers, literature reviews can be time consuming and challenging, especially for those who work at the intersection of multiple disciplines. A growing number of tools have been developed to assist researchers with their lit reviews, including generating keywords, providing context, summarizing sources, and mapping connected publications. 

For additional information about creating literature reviews, visit our Research Guide on Literature Reviews. 

Below, we've selected a handful of free tools that are well-documented, and generally reliable for the creation of literature reviews. These can help researchers understand the literature in an existing field and make connections across seemingly disparate disciplines.

Many draw from the same data sources (namely Semantic Scholar), with some pulling from additional sources. We recommend testing out the various tools to determine which ones best suit your needs. And, as always, verify any information against library resources.

You'll note that these tools will not suffer from the same hallucination issues as other generative AI tools, since these draw from specific open databases and are not generating new content. 

1. Semantic Scholar - Originally established as a database that indexed scientific scholarship, Semantic Scholar now offers an AI search and discovery tool that searches its index of 200+ million publications to generate summaries of scholarly papers, draw connections across similar papers, make recommendations, and highlight influential citations. Free to use, but login is required to access all features. Many other tools are built on the Semantic Scholar database.
2. Elicit - This AI research assistant helps in evidence synthesis, text extraction, finding papers, filtering studies by type, brainstorming, and more. Users can enter a research question, and the AI identifies top papers in the field, even without perfect keyword matching. Elicit only includes academic papers and pulls from over 126 million papers through Semantic Scholar.
3. Inciteful - Inciteful offers two tools, a Paper Discovery tool and a Literature Connector tool, both built on free open data. The Paper Discovery tool uses network analysis algorithms to help researchers find research and evaluate the network within which it is located, while the Literature Connector allows researchers to find connections between multiple texts. The latter is especially useful for interdisciplinary scholars who may struggle to find ways of bringing different areas of study together. Their tools draw on data from a number of sources, including Open Alex, Semantic Scholar, CrossRef, and Open Citations, to connect over 2 billion citations and over 240 million papers. The Inciteful Literature Connector also has a Zotero Plugin that allows researchers to search directly from Zotero.
4. Research Rabbit - An AI research assistant designed to assist researchers in literature research, discovering and organizing academic papers efficiently. It offers features such as interactive visualizations, collaborative exploration, and personalized recommendations. Users can create collections of papers, visualize networks of papers and co-authorships, and explore research questions. Unlike the previous two platforms listed, Research Rabbit doesn’t start with a question, but a paper that already is known. You need to have a starting article to go down a “rabbit hole” to see connections between papers. 

There are many other tools out there for researchers. Please note that they often require subscriptions and offer premium features for a fee.