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The State University of New York at Fredonia Reed Library

Artificial Intelligence: AI-Powered Research Tools

AI transforms research by streamlining workflows, automating tasks, and aiding analysis. It helps with:

Lit Review & Discovery

AI finds relevant papers, suggests connections, and identifies trends.

Data Analysis & Visualization

AI crunches numbers, finds patterns, and presents clear visuals.

Writing & Editing

AI improves grammar, style, and even suggests rephrased sentences.

Content Generation

AI brainstorms ideas, outlines, and drafts content (be sure to cite and fact-check!).

Collaboration

AI facilitates communication across disciplines and institutions.


Remember:

Bias

Be critical of AI results; verify information from trusted sources.

Originality

Cite AI-generated content properly to avoid plagiarism.

AI is a Tool

AI enhances research, it does not replace human expertise and critical thinking.

 

Text Generated by Google Gemini

Tools

Elicit logo
Analyze research papers at superhuman speed

  • Elicit seeks to assist users in conducting a literature review. 
  • Elicit allows its users' to ask a research question; it then searches it's repository of over 200 million papers to find relevant papers to question. Of these papers, Elicit will extract key themes and concepts and provide a summary of key information from these in an "easy-to-use table." 
  • In short, Elicit "automate[s] time-consuming research tasks like summarizing papers, extracting data, and synthesizing your findings.
  • Pricing: 5,000 free credits and then $1 for 1,000 credits
  • On Scholarcy and Ellicit: Scholarcy (all docs & flashcards) vs. Elicit (research focus): Summarize anything vs. deep dive into research papers. Same goal, different strengths. Ellicit is more research-focused. 

 


Check out this video below to see how Elicit can help you conduct a literature review. 

Find Scientific Literature with Elicit New AI Literature Search Workflow (New Elicit Beta) from Science Grad School Coach on YouTube

  • Consensus is "a search engine that uses AI to find insights in research papers."
  • A user types a question into the search bar, and Consensus searches 200 million papers for the answer.
  • The search engine results give you summaries, consensus meters, and citation generators. They also tell you how often others have cited the article and allow you to save, export, and share. 
  • Consensus citations can be linked with Zotero
  • Pricing: Consensus has a free membership, a premium membership that is $9/month, and team memberships. They also give a 40% discount to students.

Check out the video below and the Consensus Blog for more information. 

How To Use Consensus AI - Don’t Get Left Behind! from Andy Stapleton on YouTube

perplexity logo

Where knowledge begins

  • Perplexity calls itself a research assistant. It operates similarly to Chat-GPT in that you ask it natural language questions and it responds in kind. 
  • Perplexity gives users a list of sources prior to providing a response. In the response, footnotes are used that link to the source. In this way, Perplexity provides citations for its responses.
  • At the end of a response, Perplexity also provides a list of links to similar and related topics for researchers and users' to peruse.
  • "Perplexity is your AI research assistant. It has a conversational interface, contextual awareness and personalization to learn your interests and preferences over time. Our goal is to make searching for information online with Perplexity feel like you have a knowledgeable assistant guiding you. One who knows what you care about and can explain things in a way you understand."
  • Pricing: Free or $10/month for Pro membership

Check out this video to see how Perplexity works. 

This Changes Online Searching & Research - Perplexity AI by WPTuts on YouTube

  • Rayyan helps researchers organize, manage, and accelerate their collaborative systematic literature reviews.
  • It enables authors to collaborate on projects to get article inclusion and exclusion suggestions.
  • For students, Rayyan saves time and maximizes productivity when completing systematic reviews.
  • For librarians, Rayyan makes your job easier by giving you powerful AI-backed tools to create, share, and organize systematic reviews, review teams, searches, and full texts.
  • For researchers, Rayyan makes collaborative systematic reviews faster, easier, and more convenient. 
  • Pricing: Rayyan has a free version, a professional version, and a $4/month student version. 

Check out the video below to see how Rayyan can help you during systematic reviews. 

Rayyan Reimagined | New Interface for Seamless Screening | Systematic Literature Reviews from Rayyan on YouTube

ResearchRabbit logo
invites you to reimagine research.

  • ResearchRabbit describes itself as "an innovative citation-based literature mapping tool."
  • ResearchRabbit seeks to optimize your time searching for references as you begin planning an essay, project or literature review.
  • It's concept is simple, a user uploads paper(s) they are interested in and the app finds other papers relevant to the topic of interest. 
  • "Seed" (the uploaded papers) can be added to collections. ResearchRabbit will look through these collections and find papers that are even more relevant and improve its recommendations. 
  • These collections can also be shared amongst peers where collaboration can occur. Group projects can be difficult and ResearchRabbit seeks to ease some of that burden.
  • It is important to note that ResearchRabbit can be integrated with Zotero citation management software. If you have already began a literature review or have a list of sources in Zotero, these can be directly uploaded to the ResearchRabbit website and serve as "seed" papers. 
  • Pricing: Free for researchers. "Forever."

Check out the video below to see how ResearchRabbit allows you to visualize networks of papers.
This type of graph gives new meaning to the idea of scholarship as conversation.

Homepage - Laptop - Panels from ResearchRabbit on Vimeo.

Semantic Scholar Loga: A free AI-powered research tool for scientific literature

  • Semantic Scholar is a free research tool powered by artificial intelligence for scientific literature. 
  • It was developed at the Allen Institute for AI and publicly released in November 2015."At AI2, our mission is to contribute to humanity through high-impact AI research and engineering." Hence, the information you find on Semantic Scholar is both open and free.
  • It uses advances in natural language processing to provide summaries for scholarly papers. "Our system extracts meaning and identifies connections from within papers, then surfaces these insights to help Scholars discover and understand research."
  • Semantic Scholar indexes over 200 million papers and it openly provides data records of these papers. 
  • Pricing: Free

Check out their blog and the video below to see how Semantic Scholar can help you conduct research. 

Semantic Scholar - Product Demo by Semantic Scholar on YouTube

Scholarcy logo
Read Smarter

  • Scholarcy is an online summarizing tool that provides a convenient way to quickly assess and evaluate the importance of documents such as articles, reports, and book chapters.
  • Fast summaries: Get the gist of any document in seconds, with important points laid out clearly.
  • Effortless organization: Scholarcy automatically extracts references and links to open access sources and captures figures and tables for you.
  • Build your knowledge base: Save summaries to your personal library, organize them into collections, and access them from anywhere with the free Chrome and Edge browser extensions.
  • Free and premium options: The basic features are free, while a premium plan offers advanced organization and sharing tools for just $9.99/month.
  • On Scholarcy and Ellicit: Scholarcy (all docs & flashcards) vs. Elicit (research focus): Summarize anything vs. deep dive into research papers. Same goal, different strengths. Scholarcy may be more helpful for student studying than Ellicit.

 


Check out the video below to see additional ways in which Scholarcy can help students. 

Studying can be hard: that's why there's Scholarcy! from Scholarcy on YouTube.

  • SciSpace calls itself "an incredible (AI-powered) tool to help you understand research papers better. It can explain and elaborate most academic texts in simple words."
  • SciSpace:
    • Helps researchers conduct literature reviews
    • Allows researchers to upload PDFs and ask questions about their content
    • Extracts data from multiple papers into an easy-to-read table that summarizes and gives conclusions and key findings
    • Paraphrases text
  • SciSpace has lists of top papers by fields and years. It also has a list of trending questions.
  • Pricing: Free basic version and a paid premium version.

Check out the video below to see how SciSpace can help you!

SciSpace — Do hours of research in minutes from SciSpace (formerly Typeset) on YouTube

Check out ITHAKA S+R - Generative AI Product Tracker for AI-powered research tools. 
Here, you will find a repository of  AI tools marketed towards or used by postsecondary faculty or students for teaching, learning, or research activities. The tracker is a "living document" updated regularly as new products or new information on existing products becomes available. 


  • ExplainPaper—"The Fastest Way to Read Research Paper. Upload a paper, highlight confusing text, and get an explanation. We make research papers easy to read."
  • Quillbot Paraphraser—Use QuillBot's Paraphraser to write more effectively, quickly, and intelligently. With a single button click, you can easily rework any sentence, paragraph, essay, or article to your preferred style with our free and user-friendly rewording tool, which offers a plethora of customization and editing choices.
  • Scite—Scite uses Smart Citations to find and assess scientific articles. With Smart Citations, readers can view how a publication has been cited, along with its context and a classification that indicates whether the citation offers evidence in favor of or against the cited assertion.

 

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