The world of academic research is constantly evolving, and artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a significant role in transforming the research landscape. From finding sources to analyzing data, AI-powered tools are making the research process more efficient and accurate. This article provides our roundup of the top 10 AI tools that are revolutionizing academic research.
Reviewing AI Software for Academic Researchers
What’s the toughest part of advancing in your postgraduate studies? For a multitude of students, the challenge lies in tackling the enormous amount of research required. As well as structuring it and putting all observations on paper.
The sheer number of research articles one needs to go through can be intimidating. Additionally, research material tends to be complex, making it difficult to extract the necessary information. This process demands a significant amount of time and effort. Organizing your insights and articulating them in a coherent, insightful, and scholarly manner presents yet another obstacle in postgraduate research. While AI tools for academic research can help with that issue, the essay writing sites can facilitate the process of finalizing the findings.
The Choice of The Number 1 AI Tool for Academia: Best Solution
Postdoctoral researcher Mushtaq Bilal believes that ChatGPT will revolutionize academic research, but acknowledges that many academics don’t know how to use it effectively. Academia is split between early AI adopters and those concerned about its impact on academic integrity. Bilal, an early adopter, believes that AI language models can democratize education and promote greater knowledge if used thoughtfully.
Top List of the Academic Research Software
Several experts have raised concerns about the reliability of language models like ChatGPT, noting that their output, when used as an essay writing AI, can sometimes be biased, limited, or inaccurate. However, Bilal argues that being aware of these limitations and adopting the right approach can enable language models to perform valuable work, particularly in academia.

Consensus

You can ask Consensus about relationships between concepts, or even cause and effect, like whether immigration improves the economy. It’ll give you an answer based on academic research, even listing the papers and summarizing the top ones.
But it’s got a limited scope, though. It only covers six areas: economics, sleep, social policy, medicine, mental health, and health supplements. Still, it seems like a handy resource for those topics.
It saves time by providing quick access to research-backed answers on the covered topics. Consensus bases its answers on academic research, increasing the credibility of the information. The tool provides summaries of the top articles it analyzes, making it easier to understand complex research.
It’s an easily accessible way for users to gain knowledge about specific topics without needing extensive research skills. By providing research-backed answers, Consensus promotes evidence-based thinking.

Elicit

Elicit is like a research assistant that uses language models to answer questions, but it’s entirely based on research. This makes it a solid source for having “intelligent conversations” and brainstorming sessions.
What’s cool is that it can find relevant papers even without exact keyword matches, and it can summarize them, making it a handy paper typer that pulls out the key details.
Elicit’s knowledge is solely based on research, which ensures a more reliable and verified source of information. It can find relevant papers without needing perfect keyword matches, making it easier to discover important research.

Scite.ai

Scite uses AI to provide detailed citation information for research papers, helping researchers evaluate the credibility of their sources. This service is really helpful for getting real citations from actual published papers. It’s great for improving workflows. Scite gives you answers to questions with a detailed list of cited papers. Plus, it tells you the exact number of times a claim has been refuted or corroborated in various journals, making it a powerful tool.

Research Rabbit

Research Rabbit is a tool for fast-tracking research, and the best part is that it’s free!
It can be called “Spotify of research.” Users can create collections of academic papers that the software can learn from to give them relevant recommendations. Plus, it even visualizes scholarly networks in graphs, so it’s possible follow the work of specific authors or topics.

ChatPDF

ChatPDF = “like ChatGPT, but for research papers”. It could be useful for reading and analyzing journal articles.
Basically, you start by uploading a PDF of the research paper into the app, and then you can start asking it questions. ChatPDF will then generate a short summary of the paper and provide examples of questions that it can answer based on the full article.
This could really speed up the process of reading and analyzing research papers, which can be a time-consuming task.

Perplexity AI

Perplexity AI can potentially become a number 1 tool for academic research. Arguably better than ChatGPT, Perplexity boasts functions that its famous rival doesn’t have. So what exactly is Perplexity AI?
It’s another AI search engine with powerful academic research abilities. PerplexityAI has access to a variety of different sources, which makes information completely up-to-date. The tool can draw information not only from the Internet, which most other services do well, but also from scholarly sources, WolframAlpha, YouTube, Reddit, news, and Wikipedia. After typing in a search query, a user can specify where exactly they want to receive the information from, and the tool will do the task. Additionally, it can search across individual domains or websites or summarize their content.
A significant advantage of Perplexity is its advanced functionality when searching for academic materials. Not only does it give you the result, but it also offers a list of related questions and references. This is an edge compared to ChatGPT, especially GPT-3.5, which often makes users question the relevance or even existence of the references it provides.
With all these features onboard, apps for essay, and Chrome extension, Perplexity is an excellent AI tool for academic research.

Semantic Scholar

Semantic Scholar is an academic search engine driven by artificial intelligence that enables users to filter through millions of scholarly pieces for educationally appropriate content related to their research subject. It integrates artificial intelligence, machine learning, and language processing with semantic analysis to provide users with precise search outcomes.
Using machine learning methodologies, Semantic Scholar deciphers significance and discovers links within academic papers. It then presents these findings, facilitating scholars in rapidly acquiring a comprehensive understanding.

Iris.ai

Iris.ai is an artificial intelligence tool designed to aid researchers in scientific discoveries. The service uses natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to comprehend the context of a research project and suggest pertinent literature. It helps navigate and find data sources without relying on specific keywords, making it significantly more efficient than traditional search engines.
Content-based search, context and data filtering, and extracting and systematizing data are just a few of the many other functions of this versatile research tool.

Paper Digest

Updated August 28, 2023: he service has stopped operations and the website is no longer maintained.
Paper Digest is an AI-based academic article summarization service that aims to help researchers quickly grasp the core ideas of a paper without reading the whole thing. It automatically lists out the key sentences of a paper, taking about 10 seconds to do so. It can also reduce reading time to 3 minutes. The service also imitates researcher behavior by automatically summarizing the paper and helping them decide whether it is worth reading. However, Paper Digest may not be suitable for researchers who require more detailed summaries or who need to capture all the nuances of the original paper.

SCISPACE

SciSpace is an AI-powered platform that aims to modernize scientific research workflows and collaboration. It offers a suite of tools to discover, read, write, collaborate, and publish research papers. It also links users to more than 45,000 verified journal formats that researchers can select from, making it more suitable than Word for research writing.
SciSpace is a useful service for those looking for an easy and quick way to understand scholar papers. Its AI-powered features and personalized suggestion engine can help researchers stay on track while gaining a comprehensive understanding of the topic.
Final Word
AI-powered tools are transforming the way we approach academic research, making it more efficient, accurate, and accessible. By leveraging the capabilities of these top 10 AI tools, researchers can save time, improve the quality of their work, and contribute to groundbreaking discoveries in their respective fields.
Best Tips How to Make the Most of AI Tools as a PhD student
PhD students employ AI-chatbots, such as ChatGPT, to enhance their studies and boost efficiency. Some ways they use AI-chatbots include:
- Summarizing texts for quicker reading and idea mapping.
- Checking the validity of individual arguments on different aspects.
- Exploring comprehensiveness by discussing generated options and seeking additional possibilities.
- Testing counterfactuals by presenting arguments and asking for opposing viewpoints.
- Preparing for a jury by sharing arguments and requesting ten related questions.
- Requesting critiques on arguments for improvement.
PhD students can also:
- Direct prompts from the perspective of a renowned book on the topic.
- Use ChatGPT as a writing mentor for thesis and research papers.
- Utilize it for basic proofreading of academic texts, adjusting tone and voice as needed, and rating the original text on a scale of 1 to 10.
- Generate an outline of a dissertation’s main chapter using ChatGPT-generated prompts.
- Employ the “freewriting” technique, writing down unfiltered thoughts, then prompting ChatGPT to refine the text for a scientific publication using appropriate language.
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Comments (28)
Welcome to A*Help comments!
We’re all about debate and discussion at A*Help.
We value the diverse opinions of users, so you may find points of view that you don’t agree with. And that’s cool. However, there are certain things we’re not OK with: attempts to manipulate our data in any way, for example, or the posting of discriminative, offensive, hateful, or disparaging material.
Semantic Scholar sounds great, but not searching for material behind a paywall is a big limitation. I imagine few of us here can all afford those subscriptions!
Elicit sounds like the researcher I’ve always dreamed of but could never afford. Sign me up!
I tried ChatPDF last week for one of my assignments. It’s like having a mini scholarcy in your pocket. 📚 But I do wish it had a broader scope.
Scite’s sounds alright. Its fact-checking capability is a big win for avoiding fake news in academic articles. There is at least some hope sources are relevant.
I’ve been hearing a lot about Perplexity AI. The fact that it pulls info from scholarly sources and even platforms like Reddit and YouTube is pretty cool. But how reliable is it really?
Semantic Scholar is my go-to! It’s like having a personal AI-powered librarian. But I do wish it could search behind paywalls.
Hi Johannes! Adding a research website I’ve been developing over the last few years that might be helpful here or somewhere else on the site. Expontum (www.expontum.com)- Helps researchers quickly find knowledge gaps and identify what research projects have been completed before. Thanks! -Ryan
Consensus covering only six areas is a bummer. Hope they expand their scope soon. We need more than just econ and health!
How can we be sure that they’re as reliable as traditional research methods? 🤔 I don’t trust my own research skills let alone some ai-powered machine
I get your concern, but these tools are meant to assist researchers, not replace them. We still need to apply critical thinking!
As a non-native English speaker, SciSpace’s grammar and spell-checking systems are a blessing. No more language barrier in research!
I’m all for AI, but what about the potential biases in these tools? We need to be careful and double-check everything.
Totally agree. We can’t just blindly trust these tools. They’re made by humans, after all, and humans are biased in what they publish in their articles.
Research Rabbit being the “Spotify of research” is such a cool concept. Can’t believe it’s free!
Perplexity AI is my choice. Love that it pulls info from scholarly sources and not just the internet.
Definitely give it shot! You can’t know until you try. This website is a gold mine for research papers.
I wish they included some AI tools for math research too. Not all of us are into literature, you know.
Great list! I’m bookmarking this page for future reference. Research just got a lot easier with academichelp.net
Anybody else feel like we’re becoming too dependent on AI? I mean, I get that it makes things easier, but what about developing our own skills?
I get your point, but I think it’s about using these tools to enhance our skills, not replace them. Plus, the speed and efficiency AI provides is unparalleled.
Totally agree! We need more comprehensive lists. But for now, Wolfram Alpha is pretty good for math, you should check it out.
I tried Google Scholar once, didn’t really like it. Guess I should check one of these out
Hmmm,Scite AI seems promising, but I hope it doesn’t make us lazy researchers. Remember guys, AI is a tool, not a replacement for critical thinking.
Couldn’t agree more! AI can be great, but it can’t replicate the human mind’s creative and analytical abilities. We need to keep our skills sharp.
Consensus is a lifesaver! It has totally transformed my literature review process. It’s so easy to find relevant papers now
Woah, didn’t know about these. Gonna check out Elicit. I’m hoping it will help improve my research papers.
AI writing tools should be used at colleges! Students should be taught about it
Good selection! I will definitely use it for my academic research!