7 AI-Powered Apps to Revolutionize Your Literature Review Process
Dear Distinguished Members of the Academic Community, Here are seven AI-powered apps to fast-track your literature review.
1. Research Rabbit
- Helps you visualize connections between papers
- Can create interactive graphs with one or more papers
- Helps you discover author networks
- You can make collections/folders of papers for better organization
- Extracts all references and citations from a given paper
- Integrates with Zotero. For Mendeley, you can download a BibTeX and for Endnote an RIS file.
Pricing: Free
2. Connected Papers
- Takes a single paper and creates a graph of related papers
- Also lets you add another “origin” paper. That way you it will show you new papers related to both of your origin papers
- Lets you save papers
- Saves your graph history
- Gives you prior works and derivative works
- Graphs are not interactive
- No Zotero integration
Pricing: Free: 5 graphs/month; Paid plan: $3/month (billed annually)
3. Inciteful
- Creates a graph of papers related to a single paper
- For best results, add five papers to the graph
- Prefers recently published papers over old ones
- Gives you most important papers, review papers, and top authors related to your search
- Shows you how two papers are related with each other
- Can’t save papers in collections/folders
- Integrates with Zotero
Pricing: Free
4. Litmaps
- Creates maps of papers related to a single (seed) paper
- Discover function lets you discover more papers related to papers in a map
- X-axis: articles old to new; Y-axis: articles with most citations at the top
- Lets you save papers in collections/folders
- Integrates with Zotero
Pricing: Free: 1 Litmap, 100 articles per Litmap, Basic Discover; Pro: $12.50/month Unlimited maps, articles and advanced Discover filters
5. Elicit
- Helps you brainstorm research questions
- Ask it a question and it will answer with references to published papers
- Gives you a table of papers related to your search question
- Shows you interventions and outcomes measured
- Doesn’t create any graphs
- Can’t save your papers in a collection
- No Zotero integration
The new Elicit Beta just came out and it’s going to be more powerful than ever.
Pricing: Free
6. Iris
- Gives you maps that group papers by concepts
- Unlike all other apps that have a bottom-up approach to literature review, Iris uses a top-down app approach
- Lets you save papers and build reading lists
- Saves all your graphs
- No Zotero integration
Pricing: Free: Limited functionality but still very useful; Paid: €75/month (access to over 200 million papers, search with free-text problem statement)
7. Scite
- One of the most powerful apps currently available
- Gives you “Smart Citations:” number of citations that support/oppose an article’s claims
- Has a Scite Assistant: it’s like ChatGPT for academic research. Answers your questions with references to published papers
- Also visualizes connections between papers
- Integrated with Zotero
Pricing: €9.55/month (billed annually)
Conclusion
As we embrace the age of AI, these innovative apps offer unprecedented assistance in conducting thorough and efficient literature reviews. Whether you’re a student, researcher, or academic professional, leveraging these tools can significantly enhance your research process and productivity. Embrace these technological advancements to stay ahead in the ever-evolving academic landscape.
