Research Guides: Using AI in Research: Selecting an AI Tool

Brainstorming & Writing Tools

To use the AI tool for brainstorm, be sure to reference effective prompting to get the best results.

Microsoft Copilot
By signing into copilot with your UC account, your information will have broader protections.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a writing assistant to help you improve your final product with suggestions.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like responses to natural language inputs, such as questions, statements, and commands.
Gemini

An example of a prompt you may to execute with these tools is included below:

You are in an English 1001 writing course in college writing a research paper about the extinction of rhinos. Create a database search strategy for me that includes keywords, subject headings and search string examples. Ask me questions for clarity.

Research Tools

There are many AI tools available. These provide additional options that you may want to try to best meet your needs. This is not an inclusive or a recommendation list.

Perplexity
Perplexity combines AI with web search to produce readymade answers. It cites its sources, which are real but tend not to be scholarly. It is possibly best suited for generating ideas and identifying sources than to any significant contribution to producing a review.
Scholarcy
Scholarcy can be used to find for a clear, informative summary of any complex document. it can summarise any paper, article, and textbook. Useful for researchers who need to quickly understand the key points of a research paper or create useful summaries of long reports.
Consensus
Consensus is a search engine using AI to analyze peer-reviewed scientific publications and select the most relevant information for the request. It can be a helpful starting point for research; however, users should be aware of the limitations of the platform, such as the quality of the information and the lack of relevance when a question is not asked clearly.
Inciteful
Inciteful is a free tool that allows you to find relevant literature based on one or two existing articles.
ScholarAI
ScholarlyAI can be used as a writing assistant, for large text summarization, AI-generated flashcards, as a coding assistant, and for quiz generation.
Litmaps
Litmaps is a way to find the articles and papers you need to complete a literature review. From a single paper, Litmaps generates a map of the most relevant articles that relate to your seed paper. Click on the dots to explore the articles, or add new terms to expand your search.
SciSpace
SciSpace allows you to explore and explain papers. Search for 270M+ papers, understand them in simple language, and find connected papers, authors, topics.
Elicit
Elicit is a research assistant that automates the literature review by finding relevant papers, extracting key information about the studies, and organizing it into concepts. Elicit searches and discovers concepts across papers, allowing researchers to ask their research question and get a list of answers from the academic literature.
Research Rabbit
Research Rabbit is a discovery app which unlocks a novel way to search for papers and authors, monitor new literature, visualize research landscapes, and collaborate with colleagues.
Semantic Scholar
Semantic Scholar is a tool for researchers and postgraduate students to help you find research papers and related studies. You can create a library to organize your content, and it can create a citations. You can create alerts to get notified when new papers are published in your area or when a specific paper gets cited.

Image Tools

To use the AI tool for image, be sure to reference effective prompting to get the best results. Most AI tools are still not good at creating images or flyers that include text within.