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Artificial Intelligence and Library Services: AI Research Tools

AI Research Tools

AI Research Tools

AI tools for library research can enhance your literature review by identifying relevant sources from extensive scholarly databases. However, like traditional databases, it's crucial not to rely solely on one AI tool. Utilizing various resources helps ensure you capture all important information on your topic.

Semantic Scholar

Semantic Scholar, which provides the underlying data for some other tools, offers brief summaries ("TLDRs") of the main objectives and results of academic papers. It is a powerful research tool designed to help users efficiently find academic papers, understand research trends, and explore scholarly work. Using machine learning, Semantic Scholar ranks results by relevance, ensuring that you find the most pertinent papers. The platform also features citation graphs to visualize the impact and connections of papers over time. Additionally, its semantic search capabilities allow you to discover papers with similar concepts or related research, even if they don't match exact keywords. Data is sourced from the Semantic Scholar database, and the service is currently free.

Scite

Scite offers a suite of products designed to assist researchers in topic development, paper discovery, and contextual citation searches. It shows the number of times a paper has been cited and categorizes those citations as supportive, contrasting, or merely mentioning the work.

Scite provides visual representations of citation networks, allowing users to see relationships between studies and how ideas have evolved over time. It can be integrated with reference management software, streamlining the research process.

Scite aggregates data from various sources, ensuring comprehensive coverage. It is available for free.

Connected Papers

Like Research Rabbit, Connected Papers emphasizes the relationships between research papers to help identify similar studies. It also offers a visual overview of an academic field.

Connected Papers is designed to assist researchers and developers in exploring and understanding academic literature through a visual format. After entering your input, it generates a graph that displays the selected paper and its connections to related works.

In this graph, each node represents a paper, providing details such as the abstract, citation information, and links to the full text if available.

Data is from the Semantic Scholar Database. Free (5 graphs/month); paid version allows unlimited graphing.

Elicit

Using large language models (LLMs), Elicit identifies relevant papers by searching through citations and extracting key information.

Elicit's built-in tools let you enter keywords and browse relevant research articles. Once you find articles, you can highlight and organize key points based on your research needs.

Data is from: Semantic Scholar Database. Free trial available; pay for credits after it expires.

Research Rabbit

Research Rabbit is a citation-based mapping tool that highlights the relationships between research works. It utilizes visualizations to assist researchers in discovering similar papers and connecting with others in their field.

It generates a list of pertinent papers based on your input, allowing you to browse studies that align with your research needs. It provides a visual representation of how papers are interconnected through citations and references, enabling you to explore relationships between different studies.

Research Rabbit draws from multiple databases, though specific sources are not disclosed. Currently, the tool is free to use.

Gemini

Developed by Google, Gemini (formerly known as Bard) is an AI-powered chatbot that provides relevant information in response to natural language queries.
Gemini serves as a tool for topic discovery by analyzing trends, pinpointing user interests, and offering insights based on current conversations and data. It helps users explore new subjects by suggesting related topics or generating questions based on existing knowledge.
Gemini can connect to the Internet and is available for free, a personal Google account is required.

Perplexity

Perplexity is a search engine that utilizes large language models (LLMs) to provide AI-generated answers, similar to ChatGPT. It includes citations linked above the summaries for easy reference. Based on your query, Perplexity generates a list of responses, which can include summaries, direct answers, or links to sources. The data comes from an internal search index, and while it's free, there are paid subscription options available.

Scholarcy

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. It works as a way to help you read and summarize your research but is not a search engine.

Data from: Scholarcy only uses research papers uploaded or linked by the researcher themselves. Free (short articles only); Paid version allows articles of any length.            

Consensus

Like Elicit, Consensus utilizes large language models (LLMs) to assist researchers in finding and synthesizing answers to research questions, emphasizing the findings and claims of scholarly authors in each paper. Consensus provides summaries or synthesized answers based on a review of multiple sources, allowing users to examine the evidence and references to understand the basis of the consensus. Users can follow links to access full articles or studies for a deeper understanding of the evidence and explore related topics or questions suggested by Consensus to broaden their research. The data is sourced from the Semantic Scholar database. The service is free for up to 20 searches per month, with a paid version available for unlimited searching.

ChatGPT        

The AI chatbot ChatGPT has multiple purposes; one of them is in the development phase of an initial idea, which can produce bibliographic sources.

There is a free and a paid version of ChatGPT.