In this post I share a collection of some of the best AI academic search engines that I wish they were around when I was doing my PhD. They could have saved me a lot of effort and time. While these AI academic search engines are valuable at any stage of research, I find them particularly helpful in conducting literature reviews, which typically involve extensive exploration of existing scholarship.
Using these AI tools will allow you to access relevant research materials more efficiently and organize your papers more effectively. You can also combine these with the PDF Chat Tools I covered in an earlier post to further streamline your research process.
For those of you interested in learning about how to use ChatGPT in your teaching, check out my book “ChatGPT for Teachers.”
AI Academic Search Engines
Here are our top recommendations for best AI academic search engines:
1. Semantic Scholar
Semantic Scholar is an AI-powered search engine for over 214 million scientific publications across all disciplines. It allows refined searches using filters such as journals, conferences, authors, publication formats, and date ranges. Results can be sorted by recency, relevance, or citation count.
One standout feature is the “highly influential citations,” which identifies publications with significant impact based on a machine-learning model analyzing citations. Other features include saving papers to your library, creating author alerts for recent publications, and setting up topic alerts for new papers.
I’ve used Semantic Scholar for years, and the platform has integrated several AI features to enhance functionality. These include TLDR, which provides concise summaries for papers, and AI-powered paper recommendations based on your library. You can also explore topics with AI-generated definitions and related papers.
The “Ask This Paper” feature lets you interact with a paper’s content by asking specific questions, and the Semantic Reader facilitates reading by offering citation cards, TLDR summaries, and a table of contents to help navigate between sections.
2. Consensus
Consensus is an AI-powered academic search engine that helps you quickly find relevant research papers. Simply input your research questions and enable the ‘Synthesize’ toggle. Consensus then synthesizes insights from a vast pool of academic papers and presents results in a user-friendly format, with each tile representing a single paper. Each tile includes information about the journal, authors, and citations, along with a grey box containing key insights from the paper or answers to your questions.
The ‘Study Snapshot’ is one of my favourite features. It provides an AI-generated summary of the paper’s population, sample size, methods, and outcomes. Clicking on the paper title reveals detailed information, including references, links to full texts, and quality metrics.
Consensus also offers powerful research filters to refine searches by sample size, study design, methodology, and more, and includes paper quality indicators to assess credibility. This helps streamline the literature review process by extracting main insights and citing sources, allowing you to explore relevant literature and expand your research efficiently.
3. Elicit
Elicit is an AI-powered academic search engine ideal for preparing literature reviews. Simply input your question, and Elicit synthesizes insights from relevant papers, providing titles, authors, journals, citations, summaries, and external links for further exploration. You can refine your search with filters such as publication year, journal quality, study type, PDF availability, and more.
For example, using the ‘Abstract Keywords’ filter, Elicit returns papers with abstracts containing your specified keywords. Additionally, you can filter papers using over 30 predefined columns or create custom ones.
Elicit offers a library service to save and organize papers and a notebook feature to capture thoughts and highlights. You can upload PDFs to extract insights, aiding in reading papers. An interesting feature is the ‘List of Concepts,’ which allows you to search for related concepts across different papers. This helps you learn more about your research topic and discover new research avenues. Elicit excels at citing sources and provides comprehensive information to streamline your literature review process.
4. R Discovery
R Discovery is an AI tool designed to assist with academic research, making it easy to find relevant papers. Start by creating an account and customizing your feed by selecting your research area and adding topics or journals. This will generate a feed of research papers tailored to your interests.
Each paper in the feed includes details like the abstract, DOI link, options to export to Zotero or Mendeley, an audio version, translation, and more. The ‘Similar Papers’ feature is particularly useful, providing an AI-curated collection of papers on the same topic, helping you discover relevant materials to enrich your research.
R Discovery also features a custom GPT called Ask GPT, allowing real-time interaction with the R Discovery bot inside ChatGPT. You can ask questions, and Ask GPT will fetch and synthesize answers from its extensive database of scientific and academic papers, providing a seamless way to enhance your literature review process.
5. Connected Papers
Connected Papers is another excellent AI tool to help you with your research. It offers a wide variety of features but the unique feature I like the most is its ability to create visual graphs that map out connections between papers. More specifically, Connected Papers allows you to build a graph of similar papers based on a specific paper or topic.
This visual mapping provides you with a quick overview of several elements related to your research including trends, popular works, key influences, and emerging topics in the field. you can use Connected Papers for several research-based tasks including searching for and identifying semila works and papers related to your research topic, building comprehensive bibliographies, discovering prior and derivative works, and staying updated on recent publications in your field.
6. Scite
Scite is a little bit different in that it does not only enable you to search for research papers but also analyzes how those papers are cited. Scite provides detailed context to help you determine whether the citations support, contrast, or simply mention the research. Citation statements provided by Scite are especially helpful for understanding the impact and credibility of a paper.
Other important features provide by Scite include reference checking to ensure accurate citations, managing article collections for systematic reviews, creating visualizations and dashboards to explore citation networks, and integrating an AI assistant for generating insights and building reference lists.
7. Perplexity AI
Perplexity AI is an AI chatbot that is relatively similar to ChatGPT Search. What I like about Perplexity is the ability to choose the Large Language model that you want. You can select among GPT-4o, Claude-3, Sonar Large (LLama 3.1), and others.
Other interesting features provided by Perplexity which proves helpful for researchers include: cited responses (answers include detailed citations), related question suggestions (helps guide you towards deeper exploration of content), file upload and analysis (supports uploading and analyzing various files), visualization tools (integrates with DALL-E and Playground AI allowing you to generae visual representations), and many more.
8. Research Rabbit
ResearchRabbit is not technically an AI research engine but rather a citation-based literature mapping tool. It will help you focus on finding and visualizing connections between different scholarly papers using ‘seed papers’. Seed papers are initial research papers that you select as starting points for your research.
Here is how ResearchRabbit works: first create an account and add one or more seed papers to start your research. The tool automatically finds and maps out similar papers based on the references and citations of the seed papers.
Next, choose how you want to visualize those connections using different graph types and you can further filter them by relevance, citations, or alphabetically. As you review papers, you can add relevant ones to your collection, which automatically updates the network with new connections, helping you build a comprehensive body of research.
Related: Best Google Scholar Alternatives
Final thoughts
I hope you have found these tools helpful in navigating your academic research. I strongly believe in the power of AI in enhancing one’s research and professional growth. Things that used to take us so much time and effort can now be done more efficiently and effectively using AI and research is one of them. Go ahead, give these tools a try and share with us your feedback on our social media profiles!
