AI tools can be useful in the research process, such summarizing a body of research, looking for related research, and organizing literature reviews. Before you start using one of the below apps make sure you check with your professor as to whether or not it is ok for you to do so, and make sure you understand the ethical consideration, such as privacy and copyright, before using.
According to AI expert Ethan Mollick, it takes around 10 hours of use to become proficient with GenAI or other innovative AI apps. Before using with your assignments as an instructor or student, make sure you put in the time to understand these tools
Uses
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Tool
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Cost
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Background Research
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Perplexity: AI powered search engine that provides concise answers using web-based resources. Use to generate terms, become familiar with new topics, or to ask question about your research.
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Free to use; Pro subscription allows unlimited searching, different LLM sources, and data visualizations
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Translation
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Useful for translating research articles into or out of English.
ChatPDF: upload PDF, limited to 2 PDFs a day at 120 pages each
ChatGPT: copy and paste text, limited to 4,000 tokens
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ChatPDF: Free for up to 2 PDFs (less than 120 pages); Plus subscription allows unlimited numbers of PDFs
ChatGPT: Free uses older LLM data; Pro subscription uses newer LLM, and includes other AI apps
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Searching for scholarly articles
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Semantic Scholar: use author, title, or DOI for searching, and the app will bring up related research.
Consensus: an academic search database that lets you input research questions, view aggregated research article results with summations of widely accepted studies.
Scite_: Analyzes scientific articles citation patterns to help construct components of a literature review and support critical analysis.
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Semantic Scholar: Free with Sign Up
Consensus: Free with Sign Up; Premium subscription allows unlimited use of some features
Scite_: Requires a subscription to use.
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Citation tracing for literature reviews
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Connected Papers: Creates visual maps of related academic papers.
Research Rabbit: Uses data from Semantic Scholar to explore similar works and authors.
LitMaps: Uses a single relevant paper to locate other articles of interest and generate a visual literature map to explore for your literature review.
Inciteful: Provides related papers to key articles, and illustrates how different papers are related to one another through the literature. Especially helpful for multi-disciplinary research.
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Connected Papers: Free for up to 5 graphs a month; Academic subscription allows unlimited use.
Research Rabbit: Free
LitMaps: Free for limited searches and data visualizations; Pro subscription allows for unlimited searches and visualizations
Inciteful: Free to use
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Brainstorming Concepts/Ideas
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ChatGPT: Create prompts for subtopics, organize/outline a paper, and brainstorm open data sources; not suitable for producing citations; all content input into ChatGPT becomes useable by OpenAI
Elicit: AI research assistant that allows you to type in a research question or upload example articles; returns related questions, subject headings, and keywords to make optimize database searching.
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ChatGPT: Free uses older LLM data; Pro subscription uses newer LLM, and includes other AI apps
Elicit: Free with sign up, restricts usage beyond pre-set credit allowance; Pro subscription gives you 12,000 credits to use per month, and you can purchase more.
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Comprehension of Research
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ChatPDF: Ask questions of uploaded documents, guided by AI.
Consensus: Provides study snapshots with population, sample size, methods, and outcomes; the synthesize feature provides a summary of all results and offers consensus graph.
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ChatPDF: Free for up to 2 pdfs (less than 120 pages); Plus subscription allows unlimited numbers of PDFs
Consensus: Free with Sign Up; Premium subscription allows unlimited use of some features
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