AI tools have quickly become an indispensable asset in today’s landscape of academic research. These tools have drastically reshaped how people analyze, explore, and interpret information for academic purposes. In pursuit of innovation, they act as catalysts to transform the scope of academic research.
Academic research is a tedious task. It involves reading hundreds of websites and research papers to jot down your needed information. However, with AI for research paper writing now becoming a norm, all you need are the right AI tools, and your research will become easier than ever before. Moreover, these tools enhance accuracy, allowing researchers to focus more on the application and interpretation of their findings.
To that end, we’ve curated this list of the top 10 AI tools for academic research. These tools, using data analytics, natural language processing, and machine learning, will help you foster breakthroughs and automate your research to gather more accurate and relevant information in less time. Let’s dive in.
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AI Tool of the Day
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Best AI tools for academic research
1. Google Scholar
Google Scholar is hands-down the best AI academic research tool that both students and scholars can use. It acts just like the Google browser itself and, hence, offers a simple and user-friendly interface that involves no complex navigation. Just type in the topic you need to research, and it will generate results just like the browser does.
Google Scholar is designed to help researchers stay updated on the most recent articles, research papers, scholarly literature, theses, and conference papers, along with relevant citations and publications. Moreover, the tool highlights the search results with tags like ‘PDF’, ‘HTML’, and ‘BOOK’ to help you quickly see which search result is what instead of manually checking each one.
2. Research Rabbit
If you need an AI tool for finding research papers, Research Rabbit will be your go-to. It’s a powerful AI tool for finding and organizing research papers for both you and any collaborator you’re working with. All you need to do is enter a phrase or keyword, such as “interoperability with IoT,” and Research Rabbit will generate a list of relevant research papers via PubMed search or Semantic Scholar.
After signing up, you can search for topics and add your desired papers to a ‘Collection.’ You can then rename the collection and share it with your co-researchers via email, making it seamless to collaborate on a group of research papers.
Additionally, Research Rabbit has helpful functions to help collaborate and even organize your research work. You can ‘Select All’ your research papers or choose a particular publication within your collection and perform these actions:
- Check publication orders by date
- View paper abstracts
- Remove papers from your collection or add them to another collection
- Explore various authors’ works
- Export your collections in other desired formats
- Explore suggested authors
- Make your collections public and share them with collaborators
- Receive email updates
3. Scite
Scite is one of the most popular AI tools for academic research today. It’s built to not only help with researching but also enhance academic research seamlessly. The tool’s own machine learning and natural language processing help users conduct more thorough research and analyze citations.
Scite is currently one of the most trusted AI research tools, with organizations like UCLA, Wiley, Thieme, Frontiers, and Europe PMC being its active users. The tool offers a large pool of 186 million book chapters, articles, datasets, preprints, and 1.2 billion citation statements analyzed and extracted, allowing you to perform in-depth research with ample information available.
Additionally, this AI-powered research tool comes with a ‘smart citation’ feature that allows you to check how a specific publication has been cited. This feature offers the context of citations and classifications describing whether they support or have a contrasting proof for a cited claim. Other than this, there are other helpful features for creating dashboards, searching citation statements, visualizing research, and more.
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4. ReadCube Papers
ReadCube Papers is an excellent AI-driven citation and reference manager software that helps users access scholarly articles from anywhere. Using this tool, you can easily annotate, read, and share research articles on various devices, so you can work on your academic research wherever you are.
To use this tool to its maximum potential, you can download the ReadCube Papers Chrome extension (also available for other browsers). Once installed, you can easily locate and save full research articles to your browser library for seamless access. Additionally, this AI tool for academic research is ideal for downloading articles from your preferred browser. You can simply click on the article and download it using the ReadCube Papers sidebar that will come up on the browser extension after you install it.
‘Annotation’ is another feature of this tool that is a must for academic researchers. This feature highlights article excerpts and saves your chosen highlights on the article’s dashboard.
5. Elicit
Elicit is an AI academic research tool that acts like a search engine to provide credible sources for any research query. You can use Elicit’s desktop app or directly from your preferred browser.
Elicit is designed to automate research-related tasks that are quite time-consuming, like extracting data, synthesizing findings, and summarizing papers. It’s trusted by researchers from the most prominent organizations, like Google, NASA, Stanford, and Microsoft, and for good reason. The tool is based on a comprehensive database of 200 million research papers, offering one-sentence abstract summaries, the option to extract paper details into organized tables and search for more research papers based on the ones you view first.
Additionally, Elicit offers dedicated sections to manage your research answers. The ‘Summary’ section offers a synthesis of the top research papers with in-text citations. The middle section of the page houses the name and author of the resource material, and the right-hand section offers an ‘Abstract Summary’ of each resource.
6. Consensus
Consensus is a vital tool for researchers as it’s designed to mitigate the risks of fake news and misinformation, which are byproducts of AI implementation. Consensus offers evidence-based answers to your research questions, providing credible information to stay away from any false data or AI-generated misinformation.
Once provided, you can share the tool’s answers by sharing the link, copying the text, or reposting on X (formerly Twitter). Moreover, you can copy the citations in different formats, and if you select an answer, Consensus will take you to the journal article itself to let you access the full content.
7. Zotero
Zotero isn’t just another AI tool for academic research. Rather, it’s a personal research assistant that is completely free to use and helps you collect, annotate, organize, share, and cite research effortlessly.
Zotero comes with a desktop application and browser extension, giving you full access to save articles, web pages, and PDFs directly from your browser while researching. Additionally, the tool automatically senses content within your web browser so that you can add it to your personal library with just a click. It also generates bibliographies and citations in your preferred styles and offers seamless word processor integration to write your academic papers without hassle.
8. SciSpace
SciSpace, now known as Typeset.io, is an AI-powered research tool that helps users publish their research work. Typeset.io acts as a one-stop shop for all research publishing needs, from peer review and publication to manuscript submission.
The tool has dedicated sections for all publishing requirements, offering an easy-to-navigate interface. The ‘SciSpace Literature Review’ section offers a handy search bar to also get research papers, and you can use the ‘my library’ filter here to sort through your saved papers. There’s also a ‘citation generator’ section to simplify citations as the tool uses AI to provide accurate and instant APA citations. Additionally, there’s an AI detector and paraphraser to help further streamline the process while maintaining data relevance and accuracy.
9. Scopus
Scopus is designed to combine a vast, expertly curated citation and abstract database with high-quality data and linked scholarly literature across numerous disciplines. Using AI, Scopus rapidly finds authoritative and relevant research and prominent experts and offers access to reliable metrics, data, and analytical tools.
Scopus comes with a wide range of tools to streamline academic research. There are tools to track, analyze, and visualize your research output, along with citation analysis to let you track citations of scholarly works, assess research impact, and even identify influential research trends.
Thanks to its robust AI algorithms, Scopus is an excellent AI academic research tool that offers extensive coverage of research, allowing users to explore and access large amounts of academic literature and monitor how their research is performing.
10. ChatPDF
Lastly, ChatPDF is another AI tool that is exclusively for researchers. The tool allows users to understand PDF files, which is extremely helpful when conducting research that involves large PDF files filled with data that’s often hard to comprehend.
In a nutshell, the tool is just like ChatGPT but for PDFs. You can get academic articles, scientific papers, and interdisciplinary books with just a search and even extract insights about financial reports, manuals, legal contracts, etc. One of the best features of this tool is its multi-language support, as ChatPDF works globally. So, you can upload PDFs of a language you don’t understand and let the tool translate the entire content for your interpretation.
How to choose the best AI tool for your needs?
Whether you’re looking for AI tools for academic research or coding, or any other purpose whatsoever, there are certain factors you must consider to choose the best-suited tool. Here are the key pointers you must keep in mind:
- You must have clarity about your objectives. Do you need a tool for research, data analysis, image generation, or textual content creation?
- Clearly understand the tool’s purpose. Go through its website or application information to understand its functionalities and whether they fully align with your needs.
- Consider the tool’s learning curve. If the AI tool has a complex interface and features that you barely understand, it will take quite some time before you can properly use it for your needs.
- Check if the tool has robust documentation, active forums, and reliable customer support. These will help with any problems you may encounter while using the tool or if you need guidance about a particular feature.
Conclusion
While using AI in academics remains controversial, using it responsibly is the key to experiencing its amazing benefits. As mentioned here, these AI tools for academic research can help individuals go leaps and bounds ahead when it comes to their research work and using time intelligently.
Having said that, if you’re new to AI tools, then using the academic research tools mentioned here could get tricky. In that case, sign up for Be10X workshops to understand how AI tools work and master their usage to be adept at using AI academic research tools to speed up your work.
Be10X offers a hands-on AI workshop to explain how AI tools like ChatGPT work and how you can use them to automate day-to-day tasks. Learn more here.
