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Overview of AI tools for literature searching
There are many new AI tools available to researchers and students which focus on academic sources (rather than general AI tools such as Copilot or ChatGPT). These tools offer a powerful new method of discovering academic literature and can be a great complement to traditional methods of searching the literature in your field.
For thorough or comprehensive searching such as for a research paper or thesis, you should still search the major academic databases in your field. These AI tools use freely available or negotiated underlying datasets. These datasets do not necessarily contain the important journals in any field, however academic databases are produced specifically to provide this coverage. You can find the databases in your field in our Subject Guides.
Selected tools
Some of the more popular tools you might like to explore are below. Note that there are many more, and new developments are happening all the time. You can search the web to investigate what is available.
| Tool | Access/cost | Data source | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elicit | An account is required to use Elicit. There is a free basic plan, and paid plans for extra features and capabilities | Semantic Scholar. Elicit can base answers on abstracts, plus the full text of open access papers | Enter your topic or question in natural language |
| Scite | Scite requires a login and payment to use Scite Assistant, or to see the full Scite Search results | Agreements with selected partners. | Scite has two main components. Scite Search lets you explore citation links between papers, and whether citations are positive, negative etc. Scite Assistant is the AI research assistant |
| SciSpace | You can use SciSpace without creating an account. There is a free basic plan, and paid plans for extra features and capabilities | Unknown | Enter your topic or question in natural language |
| Consensus | You can search Consensus without creating an account, although certain features do require an account. There is a free basic plan, and paid plans for extra features and capabilities | Semantic Scholar | Enter your topic or question in natural language. Turning the Copilot feature on enables you to give conversational commands such as 'Write a 3 paragraph literature review on...' or 'Give me a two sentence summary in simple language on...' |
| Keenious | You can use Keenious without creating an account. There is a free basic plan, and paid plans for extra features and capabilities | OpenAlex | Keenious offers you recommendations of papers and topics, based on the text you're writing. You can write straight into the box on the Keenious website, or add the Keenious addon into Word or Google Docs on your personal device |
How to use these tools safely
- Use these tools as an extra technique for research and not to replace a thorough search.
- Verify any information provided by generative AI tools with credible sources and check for missing information.
- Note that most of these tools do not have access to the full text of papers - they base their answers on titles and abstracts only. You should always access, read and cite the full papers that you use in your work.
- Many AI tools will incorporate anything you upload into their underlying software. In general:
- Don't upload materials from Library resources such as databases. This is in breach of copyright, and license agreements
- Don't upload your own sensitive or private documents. It's possible another user of the tool might retrieve your information from the underlying software
- You should acknowledge your use of AI tools to complete your work. See our guide on using Generative AI tools for assignments for more information.