Research Guides: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Scholarly Communications: AI Tools for Academic Research and Writing

AI Tools for Academic Research and Writing

Please note: The applications listed here are illustrative of various forms of artificial intelligence-powered applications that might be utilized in scholarly communication activities and many are known to be commonly used by UMD faculty and students. However, is not a comprehensive list of tools, nor an endorsement by the author of this guide, the University of Maryland, or UMD Libraries for any of these applications.

Research - Search and Organize Academic Sources

Name	Description	Underlying Data Source
Elicit	Elicit uses LLMs to find papers relevant to your topic by searching through papers and citations and extracting and summarizing key information.	Semantic Scholar
Research Rabbit	Research Rabbit is a citation-based mapping tool that focuses on the relationships between research works. It uses visualizations to help researchers find similar papers and other researchers in their field.	Open Alex, Semantic Scholar, and other databases
Connected Papers	Like Research Rabbit, Connected Papers focuses on the relationships between research papers to find similar research. You can also use Connected Papers to get a visual overview of an academic field.	Semantic Scholar
Keenious	Keenious recommends academic articles and topics based on papers you upload.	Open Alex
scite	scite can help develop research topics, find papers, and search citations.	Many sources (an incomplete list has been provied on this page)
Consensus	Consensus uses large language models (LLMs) to find articles that are relevant to a particular research question. It can summarize authors' findings and claims in each paper and help to synthesize scholarly consensus across a body of literature	Semantic Scholar

Analyze and Summarize

Name	Description	Data Source
Scholarcy	Summarizes key points and claims of articles into 'summary cards' that researchers can read, share, and annotate.	Scholarcy only uses research papers uploaded or linked by the researcher themselves.
SciSpace	SciSpace is a mutlitool platform that offers search and discovery of academic papers but also allows users to upload PDFs to search, summarize, and synthesize their contents. SciSpace also offers tools for drafting and generating citations/works cited lists.	Open Alex, Semantic Scholar, and Google Scholar, as well as materials uploaded by researchers themselves.
Recall	Summarizes YouTube videos and PDF contents and lets the user store it in a knowledge graph.	Recall works by allowing you to upload or scrape content from the internet including HTML articles and other texts, PDFs, Google Docs & YouTube.
ChatPDF	Allows users to upload a PDF document and then "chat" with it by asking questions and receiving answers based on the document's content.	Uses research papers uploaded or linked by the researcher themselves.

Create

Name	Description	Data Source
ChatGPT	AI-powered chatbot developed by the company OpenAI. Can be used for a variety of tasks including authoring, summarizing content, searching the open web, and more. Because of the unknown nature of the underlying data and the known propensity for "hallucinations" - nonfactual texts and citations - produced by this and and other chatbots, you should always look up claims and sources to verify their credibility.	This LLM is regularly updated and uses sources from all over the internet, meaning that unlike some of the research-focused applications above, it does not specifically draw on peer reviewed or otherwise vetted scholarly materials.
Claude	AI-powered chatbot trained by Anthropic using Constitutional AI. Anthropic states that the tool was developed to be more safe, accurate, and secure than some other LLMs. In addition to writing tasks, Claude can be used in developmental stages of research for brainstorming and data analysis.	This LLM is regularly updated and uses sources from all over the internet, meaning that unlike some of the research-focused applications above, it does not specifically draw on peer reviewed or otherwise vetted scholarly materials. Claude's data also includes licensed data sets. Data is updated regularly with each model version having a different cut-off date.
Gemini	An AI-powered chatbot developed by Google. It responds to natural language queries with relevant information and can be used for search, summarization, and drafting/content creation.	Gemini is connected to/searches the internet. unlike some of the research-focused applications above, it does not specifically draw on peer reviewed or otherwise vetted scholarly materials.
magicslides.app	Automatically generate presentation slides from topics, YouTube links, PDFs, and Word documents.	Content linked or uploaded by the user.

For an up-to-date and expanding list of generative AI tools, visit the Ithaka S+R Generative AI Product Tracker, which lists tools by their primary purposes. The tracker includes pricing information and updates on the tools' features and limitations.

There are many existing research tools and databases that now have AI tools added on or built into the applications. These can look like AI-assistants in authoring aids like Microsoft Word or image generators in Adobe Photoshop. Many search engines, from Google and Google Scholar to dedicated academic indexes, like Scopus, now have built-in AI-tools that can summarize information, visualize connections between content, and perform other tasks like the dedicated artificial intelligence products listed above. It is important to recognize when you are utilizing these AI-powered aspects of traditional products and websites and to consider how that will affect your need to review the quality and truth of your citations, check for plagiarism and infringement, and disclose your use to collaborators, publishers, and funders.