AI Resources for Searching and Understanding Academic Literature

Background

• Artificial-intelligence search engines wrangle academic literature https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01907-z

Help Finding Search Terms

• https://bard.google.com/chat or https://chat.openai.com/

Prompt:

"I am doing a literature search on [your topic here] - I'd like some keywords that will help me find papers in Google Scholar [or other source]"

Literature Searches

• https://elicit.org/
  • This is another good place to ask a general research question. The sources provided link to articles in Semantic Scholar where you can see more related articles. Besides the sources cited in the “answer”, there is a list of other relevant papers below the answer.
  • Elicit.org for writing a literature review (16 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy2myE76ZfY&list=PLG9A6ovzPqX4CrBpjATistTQ-5sbqmMy_&index=14
  • Elicit Beta demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0keldj3ZHEE
  • More recent Elicit demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iqloiq3u9pA
• https://consensus.app
  • Consensus.app is another place where you can ask a general research question and get a list of relevant literature sources.
• https://www.semanticscholar.org/
  • Find Literature with AI using Semantic Scholar for Free (11 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01TqmHouKLw&t=54s
• https://www.sourcely.net/
  • Sourcely may help you find sources for specific assertions in your paper.
  • Use AI to find sources for your paper (8 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4cNn0SY1YY
• https://getliner.com/main
  • Provides an AI-summarized answer to a question but includes a reference list.
• https://scite.ai/assistant
• https://www.undermind.ai/query_app/query/

AI General Search Engines

• https://www.perplexity.ai/
  • This is similar to ChatGPT, except it provides sources for the answers. The source list appears above the answer. This is a good place to start by submitting a general question. Sources include both scholarly and popular literature. Scholarly literature is preferred for academic work, but when scholarly papers aren't available for your topic, popular sources are an acceptable backup.
  • How to use Perplexity for research (14 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne-j_U2Vkfw
  • How to Use AI to Learn Your Research Field with Perplexity AI (10 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miMR91GZGvE&list=PLG9A6ovzPqX4CrBpjATistTQ-5sbqmMy_&index=42
• (rumored) search.chatgpt.com

Find Additional or Updated Articles from a Seed Article

• https://researchrabbitapp.com/
  • a. Once you have some articles, you can put them in ResearchRabbit and you can see similar articles and articles cited by the article and other articles that have cited the article. This is a nice way to find other relevant articles and to see how an article fits in the body of research available on a topic.
  • A Total Beginners Guide to Research Rabbit (9 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yTs-jZygE0&list=PLG9A6ovzPqX4CrBpjATistTQ-5sbqmMy_&index=19
• https://www.litmaps.com/
  • This is another site that lets you see a research article in the context of articles it cites and more recent articles that cite your article.
  • Some explanation of this site can be found at time index 2:35 in How to Write an Exceptional Literature Review (15 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz8lg_3j3Ok
• https://www.connectedpapers.com/
  • This is another site that lets you see a research article in the context of articles it cites and more recent articles that cite your article.
  • Some explanation of this site can be found at time index 6:05 in How to Write an Exceptional Literature Review (15 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz8lg_3j3Ok

Literature Summary

• Scispace https://typeset.io/
  • You can enter a general research question and get a list of articles with short article summaries.
  • How to Find Scientific Literature Faster with SciSpace Literature Review Tool (14 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AGZ5MvGVzg
• Explain Paper https://www.explainpaper.com/dashboard
• Use Bing Chat in Edge Browser
  • This tool can summarize articles and web pages that have been opened in the Edge browser.
  • https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/learning-center/how-to-use-bing-in-sidebar?form=MA13I2
• Use Leo in Brave browser
  • https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/02/braves-leo-ai-assistant-is-now-available-to-desktop-users/
• https://www.chatpdf.com/
  • Chat with a PDF document by dragging it to the web page.
• https://docanalyzer.ai/
  • This is a paid site to chat with multiple documents.
• https://www.unriddle.ai/
  • Help understanding a research article by asking questions and getting explanations.
• https://claude.ai/chats
• https://copilot.microsoft.com/
• https://notebooklm.google/
• https://www.wordtune.com/summarizer
  • Free version seems better than many others

Find an Article PDF

• Try to access the pdf through the library first, but when all else fails, you can try https://sci-hub.se/

Workflows

1. Come up with a question.
2. Search https://elicit.com/?workflow=table-of-papers
   1. Review the list of article titles
   2. Review abstract
   3. Copy DOI if available
3. Get article reference on https://www.semanticscholar.org/
4. Create a literature map to get more recent/related articles on https://www.litmaps.com/
5. Add relevant articles to citation manager like Zotero.