Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Learning and Discovery: Popular Tools

Before integrating AI tools into your work, ensure you have a basic understanding of the AI tool you are using including strengths and limitations. All AI tools have their own set of training data, so no two AI tools will yield the same results, and results have been shown to be erroneous depending on the platform. Privacy policy and terms of use must be read before using the tool. If you do not agree with these statements, you are advised not to use the tool. Use AI at your own risk and always cross-check your findings via traditional search methods.

ChatGPT is a great brainstorming tool when paired with thoughtful human analysis. You should never use generative AI to write a block of text for your work as this could be considered academic misconduct, but using it to help brainstorm synonyms when developing a search strategy or as a discovery tool provides tailored support for exploring new topics.

Semantic Scholar - AI-powered search tool for scientific literature; links to author(s), journal, and database (freely available).

Elicit - Automates research tasks; summarizes papers, extracts data, synthesizes findings, and compares papers in a side-by-side table (freely available).

scite.ai - AI-powered tool that tracks citation contexts; distinguishes supportive, contrasting, and neutral citations in academic literature (free version available).

Consensus - AI-driven search engine providing consensus answers from scientific literature, synthesizing findings from multiple studies (free version available).

Keenious - Research tool that identifies relevant academic articles based on your text; integrates with word processors for easy reference linking (free version available).

ResearchRabbit, ConnectedPapers, and LitMaps are free literature mapping tools. A literature map refers to the web of scholarly conversations that happens between authors and co-citations. Use these tools to visualize these publishings, when they were published, the authors who are being referenced, and neighboring topics.