Research Guides: Recreation & Leisure: Using AI for Research

Free AI Search Tools

Elicit
Researchers commonly use Elicit to:
-Speed up literature review
-Find papers they couldn’t find elsewhere
-Automate systematic reviews and meta-analyses

Elicit tends to work best for empirical domains that involve experiments and concrete results. This type of research is common in biomedicine and machine learning. A free version exists with paid subscriptions available.
Semantic Scholar
Allows searching of over 214 million journal articles from all fields of science. Free to use. Semantic Scholar will:
-Explore topics with AI
-Create brief summaries of the main objectives and results of articles.
-Reveal highly influential articles
-Get AI powered article recommendations based off your research interests.
-Get notified when there's new research in your field or by an author you like.
-Manage your articles in one place
-Cite any article
Connected Papers
You can enter a journal article and get a visual map of similar papers in that field. It uses that Semantic Scholar Database. It's free to use, but you only get 5 graphs per month. You'll need to upgrade to a paid subscription to get more searches.

Brainstorming: Can be useful for organizing your thoughts and act as a brainstorming tool for research.
Save time by streamlining work
Breakdown concepts: Simplify complex concepts. Can sift through large amounts of information and provide concise summaries.
Summarize: Can summarize, synthesize and help you visualize research in a particular area.
Discover new research: Help you discover new research in your subject area and visualize connections between authors and literature.

Hallucinations: May give inaccurate information and make up false citations.
Can’t access paywalled content: AI can only access information that’s freely available on the Internet. AI can’t access data contained in private, subscription databases.
Scope of the training data: Can only produce results based on the data it’s been trained on. Some AI have a limited timeframe of data (up to a certain date). So it may not have access to the most recent information.
Ethics: AI can’t make judgement calls. For example, it may incorporate bias, stereotypes or hate speech it finds online.