The Best AI for the Modern Researcher

Artificial intelligence has revolutionized cybersecurity, the Internet of Things, online shopping, product and process optimization, and decision-making for large companies and has revitalized education and research.

Research tends to be open and sometimes tedious due to the long time invested in its procedures. However, it is not all bad news because AI tools have been developed to accelerate these processes, resulting in time savings and resource optimization.

Here is a summary of five AI research tools:

Rayyan

This tool uses AI and machine learning to streamline the systematic review process. Several of its modalities allow for creating, collaborating, and translating reviews and an option to view all public reviews.

In its systematic review, one can create tags, add filters, use specific exclusion/inclusion criteria, create their own, and add notes, among others. Once this process (whether individual or collaborative) finishes, Rayyan provides the option (compute ratings) to assign a rating to each article based on the filters and criteria used, also showing the undecided options.

Therefore, the more decisions made (criteria, filters, tabs), the more accurate the ratings of each article so that the reviewer knows whether to include it or not.

Rayyan has a Chatbot with integrated AI to answer questions about the application’s operation or any other doubts to resolve.

This tool has the following general functions:

• Efficient management of multiple references by assigning tags, decisions, or reasons (inclusion/exclusion).
• Permits uploading of PDFs and making notes.
• Detection of duplicate imported references.
• Finds keywords in the articles or creates them if missing or insufficient.
• Enables collaboration among reviewers.
• Allows importing references or articles for the systematic review.

Specific functions:

• My Reviews: allows you to create reviews, upload publications (PDF), and download information from databases or citation managers. Its interface has multiple functionalities. For example, it has a tab to eliminate possible duplicates and customize how to eliminate them.
• Collaboration Review: Provides the option to invite others to participate in the review, but they cannot ask others or delete search methods they did not create. It has an internal chat function for chats with persons invited to the review.
• Show: highlights the “conflicts” among reviewers so they can be viewed and later fixed in another review.
• Compute Rating: is a prediction classifier (powered by Rayyan’s Predictor Classifier) to accelerate reviews; it works by learning from the criteria and using that learning to calculate the probability of including an article in the review. The function displays a star rating of each publication to facilitate the systematic review process.

Consensus

Consensus is an AI-powered search engine for finding information in research articles. In other words, it is a Google for researchers.

The tool’s most significant functions are:

• The search results and articles can be saved in lists, either default (My favorites) or the user can create custom titles.
• It integrates with Zotero (and soon with Mendeley, Paperpile, and EndNote).
• Its GPT-4-powered Scientific Summaries function briefly summarizes the most relevant information to prompted questions (using the Summary option at the start of the interface).
• The interface contains filters to make the search more personalized, depending on what you want to search.
• It has an integrated CHATGPT-4 plugin.

Specific functions:

• Consensus Meter: Ranks the most relevant findings in articles based on how well they answer your questions (you can analyze up to 20 articles).
• Summary: GPT-4-powered scientific summaries condense the most relevant information to answer the search/question performed.

It is worth mentioning that some of the functions of this application are still in the process of refinement, and users can provide feedback to improve the site.

Research Rabbit

This artificial intelligence is considered not a search engine but a discovery engine. It is similar to Spotify but for research articles. Generally, Research Rabbit is a platform for discovering and viewing literature and scholars. The user can create alerts for newly published articles and share collections. Other general functions include:

• Creation of customizable collections to organize into categories or folders.
• Personalized recommendations for your collections, which can be adjusted using the “similar work,” “earlier work,” and “later work” options. You can also add items to your collections so that Research Rabbit’s algorithm recognizes your preferences, resulting in a personalized experience.
• Integration with Zotero.
• Information import and export for citation managers in a variety of formats.
• Ability to create interactive article charts. Each circle represents a paper, while the lines indicate their relationships. The green dots represent the authors of My Collections, the blue ones are related to the article, and the most Vioscuro dots (darkest) indicate recent publications.
• Detailed information about the authors through an interactive map, which, in addition to showing the authors’ information (publications), also shows the authors’ relationships with other co-authors (collaborations).
• Ability to work collaboratively on the platform.
• Options to download PDFs, add notes, and view abstracts.

Specific functions:

• Rabbit Radar monitors new publications through alerts.
• Add Papers allows adding articles in BibTex or RIS format or searching for them using keywords, specific titles, DOI, and Zotero.
• Timeline helps to understand how articles have been cited over time.
• Linked Content allows finding content that cites your articles.

Notably, this tool’s extensive database contains over 100 million academic articles, covering more than 90% of the materials in the most common databases, such as Scopus and Web of Science. In addition, it has materials not found on those platforms.

SciSpace

SciSpace is a platform to find, understand, and learn about any publication. Thanks to AI, it can explain and answer questions about research papers and discover publications related to the source document.

SciSpace allows researchers, editors, and institutions to collaborate and work efficiently, automating repetitive tasks and displaying information quickly. This platform has metadata of more than 200 million articles and more than 50 million open-access PDF files.

General functions:

• Literature Review:
  • Provides insights on the searches and follow-up (with the Copilot tool) to delve deeper into the topic of interest.
  • Allows filtering by open resources or PDF and year and type of publication.
  • Permits downloading files in the CVS version.
  • Provides additional filters to the default ones (contributions, limitations, methods used, results, summarize introductions) and custom filters.
  • Consultation in several languages.
• It has a chatbot to answer questions.

Specific functions:

• Copilot: This tool has several modalities:
  • Literature Review to follow up on the original review in various languages.
  • Read with AI: When uploading a PDF, Copilot provides several suggestions for understanding it. For example, explain the abstract in two lines; find contributions, results, and publication methods. Also, requesting the publication methods provides answers and allows that information to be added as a note or follow-up to get more data.
• Citation generator allows for creating bibliographic references in various formats by searching for sources directly from SciSpace or manually adding them. The styles that can be found vary from APA, MLA, Chicago, and Vancouver to AMR, AJB, and AIP, among many others.
• Paraphraser paraphrases texts in various tones and target languages. For example, when entering a text, one can select multiple “tones:” authoritarian, professional, formal, persuasive, academic, creative, and informal, among others. Thus, this tool used with AI Detector makes texts more “human.”
• AI Detector analyzes texts to detect the presence of writings created by AI (ChatGPT, GPT-4, Jasper, etc.). Transcripts can be added manually, or the user also has the option to upload a PDF file.
• Copilot has an integrated Google Chrome extension.

Scite

Despite having its article in The Observatory (which you can read here), Scite continues to update itself to offer the best experience when conducting systematic reviews. Below is a summary of these new updates.

Assistant:

• It has a new function to customize the length of the answers using the GPT3.5 model.
  • It has more bibliographic reference styles; previously, it only used the IEEE style (a number in square brackets).
  • Thanks to user feedback, the responses (information/references) to user prompts have improved relevance levels to align better with the user’s searches.
  • The user can observe the Assistant’s search strategies to find and customize the information.
  • The Dashboard now has more customizable features, allowing it to work with Assistant.
  • When you type a forward slash (/) in the Wizard input box, it opens a menu for specifying documents or panels for a specific message.
  • Old or no longer relevant sessions are now deletable.

There is no doubt that AI applications are here to stay. Every day, tools are created and improved for researchers, teachers, and students to modernize and enhance their research processes.

However, we must remember that these AI applications for educational innovation are tools and not replacements for cognitive processes, critical thinking, or human logical reasoning.

Translation by Daniel Wetta

Melissa Guerra Jáuregui

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0