GenAI offers valuable advantages for a wide range of individuals involved in research. It supports researchers at every stage of their careers, helping them streamline processes and enhance their work.
In a report from Cornell University, from the perspective of research stages, researchers can employ GenAI to do the following work:
An Example Process of Using ChatGPT for Literature Review
This image outlines a process for creating a literature review using ChatGPT.
It begins with selecting the specific literary sources to analyze in the review. Clear and specific prompts are designed to guide the interaction with ChatGPT, which is then used to generate summaries or analyses.
The process involves reviewing and refining the output based on accuracy, conciseness, and relevance, extracting key information from the responses, and supplementing the responses through collaborative learning and discussion around the content.
Examples And Use Cases of Other Generative AI Tools in Research
(Adapted from NYU Shanghai Library, credited to Ye Zhai)
Elicit
Elicit automates time-consuming research tasks like summarizing papers, extracting data, and synthesizing your findings. It tends to work best for empirical domains that involve experiments and concrete results. It can assist in literature review, systematic reviews and meta-analysis.
Find papers: Search over 200MM academic papers in Elicit (YouTube video)
Extract data from PDFs (YouTube video)
List of Concepts: Summarize concepts and examples across multiple papers (YouTube video)
Tips and information to help you get the most out of using Elicit
Litmaps
Litmaps visualizes research papers as network graphs based on publication date, citations, citing relations, and title similarity. It suggests related papers based on the connections between papers. This tool helps explore a topic beyond your known literature and assists you in literature review.
Introduction to Litmaps (YouTube video)
How to quickly visualize a collection of articles with Litmaps (YouTube video)
How to accelerate your literature review with Litmaps (YouTube video)
ResearchRabbit
ResearchRabbit is a free online tool designed for literature exploration and mapping. By starting with one or more “seed papers”, it suggests and visualizes relevant literature and researchers. This tool is particularly useful when planning essays, projects, or literature reviews.
How I use ResearchRabbit for academic research (YouTube video)
A Total Beginners Guide to ResearchRabbit: How to find relevant research articles (YouTube video)
How to Create a Literature Review Outline with ResearchRabbit (YouTube video)
SciSpace
SciSpace is designed to help you explore, read and understand research papers. It can help you find connected papers, authors, topics, and more. It can assist in literature review, generating citations, paraphrasing texts, and detecting AI in scholarly writing.
SciSpace: AI for Researchers (YouTube video)
SciSpace AI Literature Review Workspace: Find and survey relevant papers in minutes (YouTube video)
Online workshop: How to use SciSpace tools for research (YouTube video)
scite.ai
scite.ai is designed for discovering and evaluating scientific articles via Smart Citations. Smart Citations allow users to see how a publication has been cited by providing the context of the citation and a classification describing whether it provides supporting or contrasting evidence for the cited claim.
What is scite? Meet the future of citations (YouTube video)
How scite can help you with your homework (YouTube video)
scite webinar: How to use scite to help with your research (YouTube video)
Semantic Scholar
Semantic Scholar provides free, AI-driven search and discovery tools, and open resources for the global research community. It helps to extract meaning and identifies connections from within papers, then surfaces these insights to help scholars discover and understand research.
Find Literature with AI using Semantic Scholar for Free (YouTube video)
Semantic Scholar: AI for Researchers (YouTube video)
AI Literature Review Tools for Researchers: Semantic Scholar (YouTube video)
Some other tools for research are also included here with tutorials.
Note: If you incorporate AI tools in your research, it's crucial to thoroughly document their use in your publications. For detailed guidance on how to report AI usage, consider referring to the guidelines provided by the University of Michigan.