Academic AI tools
Literature discovery and review
Key features
These tools can be helpful in the early stages of your research when you are exploring a topic. They help you discover academic literature using natural language searching, summarize articles, and generate comparison tables and research reports. Some can also help with mapping and visualizing citation networks and relationships.
Caution
When doing literature searching, there are some fundamental differences between information retrieved from library databases and information generated by GenAI tools. Learn more in Choosing your search tool by Concordia Library. Do not depend solely on a GenAI tool for comprehensive searches. For in-depth research support, connect with a subject librarian.
Tools
Catchii
Cost: Free.
Feature highlights: Systematic review screening.
User data transparency: High. Does not share or store user data.
External data source: User-uploaded data.
Consensus
Cost: Free, with paid upgrades
Feature highlights: Discover and summarize scholarly sources to answer research questions; offers integration with Zotero.
User data transparency: High. Does not share or store user data.
External data sources: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex.
Elicit
Cost: Free, with paid upgrades.
Feature highlights: Discover and summarize scholarly literature to answer research questions, generate structured research reports, upload and extract summaries from PDFs.
User data transparency: Low. Does not store user-uploaded data.
External data sources: Semantic Scholar, arXiv, bioRxiv.
Inciteful
Cost: Free.
Feature highlights: Citation and reference mapping through interactive visualization.
User data transparency: Low. Privacy policy unavailable.
External data sources: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref, OpenCitations.
Keenious
Cost: Free, with paid upgrades.
Feature highlights: Discover and summarize scholarly literature to answer research questions, integrates with Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
User data transparency: High. Does not share or store user data.
External data source: OpenAlex.
Perplexity
Cost: Free, with paid upgrades.
Feature highlights: A general-purpose AI tool but with an option to set sources to academic sources.
User data transparency: Medium. Does share and store some user data.
External data source: Various (Web, academic sources).
ResearchRabbit
Cost: Free, with paid upgrades
Feature highlights: Citation and reference mapping through interactive visualization, integrates with Zotero.
User data transparency: High. Does share and store some user data.
External data source: PubMed, Semantic Scholar.
SciSpace
Cost: Free, with paid upgrades
Feature highlights: Discover and summarize scholarly literature to answer research questions, generate deep review reports, upload and extract summaries from PDFs.
User data transparency:Medium. Does share some user data.
External data source: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Google Scholar.
Scite
Cost: Free, with paid upgrades
Feature highlights: Discover and summarize scholarly literature with an emphasis on the quality of information and references, integrates with Zotero.
User data transparency: Medium. Does share some user data.
External data source: PubMed, Semantic Scholar.
Scholarcy
Cost: Free, with paid upgrades.
Feature highlights: Generate structured summaries of research papers that you upload, organize your notes and references, integrates with Zotero.
User data transparency: High. Does store some user data.
External data source: Open-access sources.
Undermind
Cost: Free, with paid upgrades.
Feature highlights: Discover and summarize scholarly literature through an AI research assistant agent using deep search.
User data transparency: High. Does share and store some user data.
External data source: Semantic Scholar and others.
