Research workflows, tools, and
My Ever-tuning system

Mindset & Values ─ System ─ Methods (Workflows) ─ Tools ─ Impact & Power

～ LaoZi, Taoism

（道、法、術、器、勢 ─ 道家 老子）

Research Tools I USE

The power of AI!

(A) Free, powerful AI-based literature discovery, recommendations, and visualization platforms

• 💚 Scite scite.ai

  • Show how research papers have been cited

  • 👍 AI research assistant!

  • 👍 Show supporting, mentioning, and contrasting citation statements

• 💚 SciSpace  scispace.com (← with referral link)

  • 👍 One-for-all platform for academics and researchers, from discovery to publishing!

  • Deep Review, Literature Review, Copilot - Read with Al, Citation generator, Paraphraser, AI Detector!

• 💚 Sci-hub sci-hub.se

  • 👍 Against the paywall

  • 👍 Reduce the hassle using the one-click sci-hub Chrome extensions

• 💚 Ai2 Paper Finder by Allen Institute paperfinder.allen.ai

  • 👍 Literature discovery

  • 👍 Free!!!

• 💚 Ai2 ScholarQA by Allen Institute scholarqa.allen.ai

  • 👍 Literature synthesis

  • 👍 Free!!!

• Elicit elicit.com

  • Combine semantic similarity with precise keyword matching to find relevant papers

  • Generate summaries of abstracts relevant to your question

  • 👍 Show possible critiques and the citation statements!

  • 👍 Allow to add more detailed information about the papers (e.g. study population, N of participants, study design, intervention details, results of the study, limitations, etc.)

  • 👍 Create tasks for yourself or use user-created tasks (algorithms) shared by other students and researchers, such as rephrase, reframe research statements, brainstorm research questions, etc.

  • Star, save & export your work (in .bib or .csv)

• ResearchRabbit (RR) researchrabbit.ai

  • 👍 Free!!!

  • 👍 Create categories (folders) for different topics

  • 👍 Create alerts for new papers relevant to your collections

  • 👍 Import references from your reference manager account (Zotero)

  • Discover and visualize relevant literature and scholars

  • Export & share collection

  • 🙄 Could be a little overwhelming compared with connectedpapers.com

• ResearchGate (RG) researchgate.net

  • 👍 Show mentioning in the citations

  • The "Academic LinkedIn" 😎

• Connected papers connectedpapers.com

  • Discover and visualize connections

  • Explore papers based on similarity, co-citations (prior work, derivative work), etc.

  • 👍 Beautiful graph and GUI, easy-to-use

(B) Powerful reference managers

• Zotero  zotero.org

  • Outperform its competitors with an active community and massive plug-ins

  • Integrate (workaround) with Obsidian

  • Google Doc, Word add-ins

• Paperpile

• Google Doc, Word add-insEndnote endnote.com/

  • With endnote one-click chrome extension, you can automatically, reliably, and correctly extracts metadata

  • Google Doc, Word add-ins

• Mendeley  mendeley.com

  • Google Doc, Word add-ins

  • Sync across the cloud (Note: Mendeley Android app has retired)

(C) Powerful AI reader and summarizer: Literature reading and summarization

• 💚 NotebookLM notebooklm.google.com

  • 👍 Source-based, in-line reference statements

  • 👍 Clear mindmap!

  • 👍 Deep dive conversation (podcast)!

• 💚 TheDive thedive.ai

  • Webpages, PDFs, YouTube videos

  • 👍 Powerful insights extraction following the ORIGINAL sections' structure!

  • 👍 Line-by-line references to the ORIGINAL text!

  • 👍 Insights and QA in multiple languages!!!

  • 👍 Powerful Chrome extension

  • 👍 Further Q&A with line-by-line references to the ORIGINAL text

• SystemPro pro.system.com

  • 👍 Statistics of findings!

• Coloop app.coloop.ai

  • Very powerful qualitative analysis AI platform!

• Genei genei.io (my affiliate link)

  • Use powerful AI-power language model

  • Subscription-based pricing model with an academic discount

    • Disclaimer: Both of us get genei credits if you enter my referral code (7A2F0EBE78)

• Wordtune Read wordtune.com/read

  • Summarize key points for you

  • Come with a chrome extension

  • Subscription-based pricing model with an academic discount

(D) Powerful personal knowledge management system (PKMS): Literature note-taking, annotation, highlighting, note-making, knowledge mapping

• Heptabase

  • 👍 Powerful visualization tool for knowledge management (like Mind maps + Notion)

• PowerNotes 

  • Powerful chrome extension

  • Support PDF OCR text recognition

  • Frequent promotions (but with some restrictions, e.g., cannot be used within the subscription period)

• Liquidtext

  • Integration of evidence pieces

• Obsidian

• Notion

• Qiqqa

  • Extremely powerful; All you can ask for (A) to (D)!

  • But ... service discontinued 😥

(to be continued...)

(H) Write and Cite

• 💚 Paperpal

• 💚 Linggle linggle.com

• 💚 Grammarly grammarly.com

• Academic Phrasebank phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk 

• Netspeak netspeak.org

• Quillbot quillbot.com

• Wordtune Write app.wordtune.com/editor

• Writefull writefull.com

  • Useful Sentence palette (similar to the content in Academic Phrasebank)

• statcheck statcheck.io

(K) Present findings: Oral presentation, conference poster, etc.

• 💚 Beautiful.ai

• 💚 Gamma.app

• Free icons and images

  • Flaticon flaticon.com

  • Unsplash unsplash.com

  • unDraw undraw.co