AI Research Tools

DISCLAIMER: Inclusion of tools or resources on this guide does not constitute an official recommendation or indicate that Saint Joseph University has vetted the tool. This guide is intended for information purposes, and tools should be independently explored and evaluated.

REMINDER: Identifiable personal information should not be uploaded into an AI, and considerations of copyright (including student copyright) apply as well.

ChatGPT:  Generative LLM AI chatbot tool; recognizes and produces text, images, audio, and video; pre-trained and fine-tuned for conversational applications.

Claude:  Generative LLM AI chatbot tool; can process text and images; uses constitutional AI training which involves supervised and reinforcement learning to improve safety and accuracy of outputs.

Google Gemini:  Generative LLM AI chatbot tool; pre-trained to recognize text, images, audio, and video; can perform online research and generate reports; collects data from conversations to personalize output to user.

Microsoft Co-Pilot:  Generative LLM AI chatbot tool; conversational search with summarized answers from web; can process and generate text and images.

Semantic Scholar

Search and discovery tool, indexing over 200 million academic papers, primarily scientific literature. Works best when logged in.

• TLDR summaries (Too Long Didn't Read)
• Easy to navigate to Figures and Tables, Citations, and References
• "Ask this Paper" feature
• Citation cards show details of a cited paper as you are reading

ResearchRabbit 

Literature discovery and mapping tool for exploring academic literature and visualizing connections between papers. Works like Spotify for papers.

• Add papers to collections (like a playlist)
• Receive personalized recommendations
• Trace connections to earlier and later works
• Find similar papers 

Elicit 

Research tool for finding, summarizing, and synthesizing papers. Free version has some limitations. 

• Conversational search interface 
• Provides concise one sentence summaries
• Extracts and synthesizes data into readable charts and graphs 
• Generates Citations

Litmaps

Research mapping tool designed for streamlining literature review. Free version has some limitiations. 

• Has advanced search options for filtering search results 
• Dynamic citation mapping 
• Integrates data from multiple datasets for comprehensive searching 

Connected Papers

Visual tool to allow users to find and explore papers and see connections to other research. Free version has some limitations. 

• Connected papers are matched by the similarity of their topic and overlapping citations, not just on direct citation
• Creates a cluster like visualization of research to identify where different papers intersect in direct and indirect ways

OpenRead

Research tool for finding, reading, and organizing papers. Free version has some limitations. 

• Paper Espresso features provides readable summary of paper content 
• Paper Q&A allows users to ask questions about articles 
• Integrated Note Taking feature

Find addtional tools with the Generative AI Product Tracker from ITHAKA

Stay up to date on new generative AI teaching, learning, and research tools for students and faculty. The Tracker is a living document, and is updated regularly as new products become available.