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Generative AI Tools and Resources : AI tools

This LibGuide includes information and suggested resources on the topic of Generative AI. It includes background information, BUas guidelines, description of various online tools and recommended reading.

AI for Academics

There are many tools available to support you while doing literature research. 

Such tools are not a substitute for reading and making notes on the literature yourself in terms of your research questions and priorities.

Pay attention: these tools generally can only find open access published materials. These tools cannot find academic articles that are behind firewalls or in subscription databases/journals. Most of BUas Library collection is not accessible via these tools.  

Many tools however are connected with Google Scholar or use Open Access publications. That is why we made a part of BUas Library collection available via Google Scholar.

Some of these tools have an option to export references from an Endnote Library into the tool, or the other way around. 

AI Tools for Literature Research

Unlike many of the popular generative tools that are still developing, many of the tools below have been developed over periods of several years. Four of these tools are developed by non-profit research/programming organizations with the goals of accelerating research methods for things like systematic reviews, visualization, and even generative summaries. Each of these four tools below is free to use and sets a precedent for being some of the most transparent developments in research-focused AI's.

  • AS Review Lab: A free-to-use, open-source systematic review assistant that leverages state-of-the-art active learning techniques in order to help review large amounts of articles/content for specific key words and qualifiers. Originally developed by a team of researchers from Utrecht University, the software is now part of a non-profit initiative driven by multidisciplinary researchers and system engineers from across the Netherlands. ASReview is still coordinated at Utrecht University. You can install the software locally on your device and keep full control over your data. You need a reference management system, such as Endnote, as well,  Tutorial: How to use AS Review Lab.
     
  • Elicit: This online platform generates brand new summaries and findings that are created using an AI reviewer and the contents of each respective paper. Developed by the Ought non-profit learning research lab, the system helps researchers find papers to cite and defined research directions. It currently provides both summary services in addition to an in-depth literature review toolset, all sourced through the over 200 million academic papers available through Semantic Scholar.  Tutorial: dig into details or Tutorial: How to use Elicit for empirical research
     
  • Semantic Scholar: Pulling from publisher partnerships, data providers, and web crawls, this AI-driven search and discovery toolset provides a streamlined search platform for over 200 million academic papers. Developed within the Allen Institute for AI, this open project has been worked on since 2015 with the goal of supporting high-quality research. Free to use. Partnerships with PubMed, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, Wiley, ACM, IEEE, arXiv, and Unpaywall. Connects to Endnote.
     
  • Research Rabbit: Using a complex AI-backed methodology, this platform is a literature mapping tool. Using a “seed” article, the platform finds relevant articles and content to link. Visualized by a bubble map of connected topics, this toolset can be invaluable for finding additional connections across a variety of disciplines as well as staying up to date with up and coming publications. This initiative is supported by a development collective, which has pledged to keep the core discovery functionalities open for all to use. Sign up required to access at researchrabbit.ai.  (University of South Florida Libraries, 2023).

The following are examples of other AI tools for literature searching and mapping currated by Cambridge Libraries (University of Cambridge, 2023):
Audemic.io, Andi, ChatPDF, Claude 2, Connected Papers, Consensus search engine, Dimensions, Inciteful, Iris AI, Keenious, Litmaps, Paper Digest, Perplexity AI, Phind, Scite Assistant, SciSpace and Talk to Books 

AI search engines

Bing

AI for writing

AI for reading