Artificial Intelligence Tools for Research
As many of these AI tools have writing modules integrated into them, you must follow the NMIT AI guidelines [PDF 337 KB] and the AI restrictions set by tutors. When using summaries provided by AI tools without revision, you will get flagged for AI usage.
Please note that these tools are not capable of replacing the systematic and reproducible search process using Boolean operators. But you can use these tools to supplement the systematic search process in library databases, and most of these AI tools have natural-language search capabilities.
Although many multipurpose academic AI tools claim to draw only on reliable academic sources, they may still hallucinate and fabricate references. Thus, all their outputs should be thoroughly examined to confirm that their sources are genuine and reliable.
It is also worth noting that many AI platforms primarily use open-access academic resources and may not fully cover paywalled content. Many publishers, such as Elsevier, have largely stopped sharing their abstracts and full-text scholarly content with the general-purpose AI platforms. Thus, users need to be mindful of the comprehensiveness of these platforms' coverage.
The tools listed under the sections titled AI tools for search, search and summary tools, and synthesising tools are largely free to use. Under the general AI tools section, platforms such as DeepSeek, Qwen, and Z offer most of their services for free. Among citation tracking tools, Inciteful and Open Knowledge Maps are free platforms. Under synthesising tools, Google NotebookLM offers most of its features free for users with not-so-strict limitations on the number of articles that can be processed at one go.
All the following AI assistants are multipurpose large language models (LLMs) capable of natural language understanding and generation. Although not specialised in academic research, they can be used to assist you in literature summarisation and synthesis, explaining complex concepts, brainstorming research questions and hypotheses and structuring your papers. Although most of them require payment to use their latest versions extensively, DeepSeek, Qwen and Z AI are largely free.
As they provide writing and summarising support, ensure that you follow the NMIT guidelines for AI use [PDF 337 KB]. Compared to AI tools that specialise in academic research, general AI tools tend to hallucinate fake references and exhibit bias in their outputs. Thus, all their outputs should always be checked against reliable academic sources
ChatGPT(external link)
ChatGPT is a conversational artificial intelligence assistant developed by OpenAI. By integrating real-time web search, it will cover recent documents more effectively. ChatGPT can help with brainstorming, summarising sources, and organising ideas for writing. It is useful for getting quick overviews, refining research questions, and supporting literature exploration.
Claude(external link)
Anthropic is the developer of this LLM-based AI assistant. It can help summarise complex topics, structure ideas, refine arguments, and explore the academic literature. By giving prompts in the tool's chat window, one can simplify most tasks related to academic research.
DeepSeek(external link)
DeepSeek is an AI assistant developed by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Company. As an open-source AI platform, it keeps most of its features, including the latest version, free for users.
Gemini(external link)
Developed by Google DeepMind, Gemini is a natively multimodal AI tool, designed from the ground up to understand and work across text, images, audio, video and code, and not just text alone. Thus, Gemini can handle complex, real-world tasks that involve multiple types of information simultaneously. It can help you in literature reviews by analysing, summarising, and cross-referencing a large number of scholarly papers and journals. It can extract methodologies and findings of papers, synthesise complex arguments, and identify critical data points across multiple documents.
Grok(external link)
Grok is an AI assistant that can understand questions, generate text, and provide explanations across a wide range of topics. It can also serve as a research support tool, helping users explore, analyse, and synthesise information more efficiently. It can assist with literature discovery, summarising complex sources, generating search strategies, and answering research questions in real time.
Manus(external link)
Manus is an autonomous artificial intelligence agent developed by Butterfly Effect but now owned by Meta. Unlike other AI conversational chat platforms, Manus is built to execute complex, multistep processes without much human intervention. This can help in academic research and writing. You can download your documents in different formats, including MS Word and PDF. Most of its premium services are behind a paywall.
Mistral(external link)
Mistral AI is an AI platform developed in France. As an academic research agent, it can help you in literature reviews, research question/hypothesis generation, data analysis and research paper writing. Mistral is fully compliant with the European Union General Data Protection Regulation.
Perplexity(external link)
Perplexity AI is a conversational search engine that delivers cited, real-time answers from web and academic sources. You can use the Perplexity Academic link(external link) to restrict your searches to peer-reviewed papers and scholarly databases, and it is ideal for literature reviews, hypothesis generation, and sourcing citations with metadata.
Qwen(external link)
Qwen is an AI assistant developed by Alibaba Cloud that provides most of its chat services for free. Like other generic AI tools, Qwen can help you in academic research and writing. Compared to paid AI tools, Qwen can generate longer documents. It has a deep research (external link)option that helps users generate more thoughtful responses through multiple rounds of web search. When you use the deep research option, you can download more detailed reports in PDF format.
Z AI(external link)
Z AI is a largely free AI assistant that can help you with your academic research by supporting you in developing research questions or hypotheses, conducting literature reviews and synthesis, processing and analysing data, and drafting and formatting. If you use the ‘Agent’ option on the right-hand side of the page, you can use the free visualisation options, such as tables, diagrams and other infographics, available in this AI platform. Unlike other general AI tools, AI agentic functions are mostly free on this platform.
The following academic search engines have AI capabilities, and most support natural language search. It should be noted that most academic AI search tools, such as Connected Papers and Research Rabbit, use the Semantic Scholar and Open Alex databases to power their searches.
Google Scholar Labs(external link)
You can also access GS Labs by clicking the Labs tab on the Google Scholar(external link) landing page. Google Scholar Labs is a new feature of Google Scholar that handles research questions in natural language. Thus, you can further refine your results by interacting with the chatbot. Unlike Google Scholar’s focus on keywords, ranking and citations, GSL builds on thematic connections based on key topics, aspects and relationships.
To make searches more effective on GSL, use specific and detailed queries. Use follow-up questions to get more focused results. Like Google Scholar, results include the number of citations, "related articles", versions, and links to available full-text articles. If you have connected your Google Scholar to the NMIT library, GSL indicates the availability of full-text documents through the NMIT library.
Lens(external link)
The lens is a research analytical platform that facilitates the search of scholarly resources and patents. Although natural-language search is available on Lens, this platform is more robust for systematic searches using Boolean operators. Compared with other search engines, this engine offers a wider range of filters, including the ability to show only open-access results. You can sort your results by various parameters, including citation count. The AI-powered analytical module helps users visualise their results in an easy-to-understand way.
Open Alex(external link)
Open Alex is an open-source platform for indexing research literature, journals, researchers, and institutions worldwide. It also features Boolean-based structured search and natural language search. Its interface features a straightforward search box with smart filter options that allow users to refine results by fields such as title/abstract, institution, publication year, and open access status.
Semantic Scholar(external link)
Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered academic research tool that helps users discover and understand scientific literature more efficiently. It offers semantic search, paper summaries, citation tracking, and personalised recommendations, making it especially useful for literature reviews and exploring influential research. As the database used by most AI academic tools, Semantic Scholar is effective for citation tracking, as it lists documents cited in reference lists and articles that cite the original article in an accessible way. It also facilitates sorting articles by full-text availability and citation count.
You can see a set of introductory videos about Semantic Scholar on this page(external link).
Keenious(external link)
Keenious is an AI-based academic search engine that helps users find relevant research by analysing text rather than relying only on keywords. It is especially useful for discovering related articles, refining search terms, and supporting literature reviews. Keenious is capable of semantic analysis of user-provided text (like paragraphs or PDFs) to recommend relevant articles. For full search results, a subscription is required. Use this guide (external link)to install the Keenious Microsoft Word add-in, which helps you find relevant research for the document you are preparing without leaving Word.
All of the following tools provide a visual overview of a research field by connecting articles primarily through citation tracking and network analysis. They build their visual graph using references, citations, and related works of seed papers, rather than relying solely on keywords. Except Inciteful and Open Knowledge Maps (free tools), all these tools have free and paid versions. Free versions have limited functionalities.
- They use one or more seed papers, a topic query, or an imported bibliography to begin the search.
- They show connected papers in a map or network view so you can explore relationships between studies.
- They are designed for literature discovery, gap-finding, and citation chasing, which makes them especially useful for reviews and scoping searches.
- They often let you export citations and share maps, which helps you move from discovery to reference management
Process of search
- Pick one clear topic or research question.
- Add one strong seed paper or import a small set of papers from referencing tools, such as Zotero, using formats like BibTeX, or RIS, if the tool supports it.
- Open the graph/map view and look for closely connected clusters, older foundational papers, and newer papers that branch from the same area.
- Expand from one promising paper at a time instead of trying to explore everything at once, so the map stays interpretable.
- Save or export the useful papers into your reference manager and repeat the process with a different seed if needed
Connected Papers(external link)
Connected Papers is a visual tool designed to help researchers discover and explore academic papers in their field. You can search using keywords, titles, DOIs or URLs of the articles.
It works by analysing thousands of papers and generating graphs that illustrate the similarities and connections between them. This gives users a visual overview of an academic field, helps them uncover important earlier studies and derivative works, and supports the creation of thorough bibliographies.
Connected Papers integrates with arXiv, Semantic Scholar, and PubMed to enable visual exploration of academic literature. Here is how each integration works. You can use identifiers and URLs of documents on ArXiv, Semantic Scholar and Pubmed to generate a graph. Note that ArXiv is a preprint server, and most articles available on this platform have not been published in academic journals and are not peer-reviewed.
The features of Connected papers include
Visual Graph Generation: Produces interactive networks that display relationships between academic papers.
Multi-Origin Graphs: Enables comparison across multiple papers to identify areas of intersecting research.
Prior Works Analysis: Surfaces foundational and seminal works within a given research field.
Bibliography Creation: Supports the development of comprehensive bibliographies by highlighting relevant papers that might otherwise be missed.
Discovery of Related Works: Makes it easier to find important prior and derivative works connected to your research.
Trend and Dynamics Visualisation: Offers a visual overview of trends, influential works, and the evolving dynamics of a specific academic field.
Inciteful(external link)
Inciteful is a citation-network tool that helps researchers discover relevant papers by following how articles cite and are cited, rather than relying only on keyword searches. As an academic support AI, it is useful for quickly mapping a topic, finding influential and related literature, and identifying how ideas connect across a field.
Inciteful uses two core tools, namely Paper Discovery and Literature Connector, to facilitate literature tracking and visualisation. It starts with one or more seed papers, builds a citation-based network, and shows the shortest literature path between two papers. It uses citation relationships, co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and ranking methods such as PageRank to surface important and similar papers.
The following two videos provide an overview of the basic functionalities of this AI tool.
Inciteful One(external link)
Inciteful Two(external link)
Litmaps(external link)
Litmaps is another citation-tracking tool with visualisation features. This Litmaps YouTube Channel(external link) lists many introductory explainer videos
Open Knowledge Maps(external link)
Open Knowledge Maps is a non-profit web-based visualisation tool that facilitates exploratory research by mapping scientific literature using AI. It reveals related but often overlooked research topics, giving you an at-a-glance picture of multiple bodies of scientific literature. Enter your research topic on the OK Maps search page to generate an interactive knowledge map of 100 journal articles from two major academic databases (PubMed or BASE).
Unlike other citation-tracking tools, it classifies the main subject areas into thematic subtopics and arranges related articles as a cluster within a circle. This page(external link) provides an overview of the tool's functionality.
Research Rabbit(external link)
Research Rabbit is another citation-tracking tool with features similar to those of Litmaps and Connected Papers. This Research Rabbit YouTube account (external link)features many accessible videos about its basic functionalities.
Scite(external link)
Most of Scite's functionalities are behind a paywall. It also provides summaries of your answers. Unlike other citation-tracking tools, Scite’s Smart Citations functionality assesses whether a finding is supported or contradicted by subsequent research.
Asta is the broadest research assistant of the three AI tools listed in this section. Consensus is the easiest for evidence-based question answering, and Undermind is the strongest for deep literature discovery and systematic-literature searching. Although these are evolving tools with similar features, you can use Asta for search + synthesis + data analysis, Consensus for quick literature-backed answers, and Undermind for exhaustive exploration. Both Asta and Undermind have integrated agentic AI functionalities. Thus, both tools are well-suited for iterative search, and you can refine your search with each step to get more focused results. As these tools focus on refining and reranking sources based on relevance, they often take longer to process searches.
Asta(external link)- Completely Free
Asta AI is an open-source, agentic AI system synergised for academic research and is completely free. This research assistant from Allen Institute for AI (abbreviated Ai2), which also developed Semantic Scholar, combines paper discovery, literature summarisation, and data analysis in a single ecosystem. It facilitates iterative search, and at each step, you can further refine your results.
Consensus(external link)
Consensus is designed to answer research questions in the literature, especially evidence-synthesis questions, using features such as the Consensus Meter, Study Snapshots, and AI summaries. When compared to other two tools, this tool is not meant for multi-step searching except through prompts. Although the paid version has more features, its free version is comparatively more powerful than other AI search tools. This Consensus YouTube account(external link) features introduction videos about Consensus.
Undermind(external link)
Undermind is a deep research agent that searches academic literature and creates thematic summaries and focused research papers. It emphasises iterative search and comprehensive coverage. As this is an agentic AI tool, refining your search is more effective in this platform. This AI tool examines your inclusion and exclusion criteria to get detailed, in-depth answers.
These AI-powered platforms are designed to cover the full academic research workflows, including literature discovery, summarisation, analysis, and writing. Given their capabilities, you have to use these tools by complying with NMIT's AI guidelines. Of these tools, Scispace, Answer this, Paperguide and Elicit are more comprehensive in their coverage of academic research support. Their free tier offers only limited functionalities.
AnswerThis(external link)
This AI-powered research assistant is designed to streamline workflows from literature discovery to writing. In addition to conducting a literature search using scholarly sources to generate literature reviews and reports, this tool identifies research gaps and provides synthesised answers to your queries. Apart from PDF chat, this tool also includes writing aids, diagram generators and citation visualisation tools. This video(external link) introduces the AnswerThis platform.
Elicit(external link)
Elicit covers workflows such as searching for academic resources, chatting with papers, and writing reports and systematic reviews. Systematic review generation and data extraction are available only in the paid version. Compared to other multi-purpose tools, the writing module in Elicit is not particularly strong.
EvidenceHunt(external link)
EvidenceHunt is an AI-powered medical research tool that helps users quickly find, analyse, and rank relevant studies, with cited answers and PICO-style analysis for clinical questions. It is designed to speed up evidence searching by pulling together results from sources such as PubMed and guidelines, then presenting them in a more usable, conversational format. The platform claims that the evidence is traceable and easy to verify.
Although primarily meant for health science disciplines, this tool could also be used for other subject areas. You need to upgrade to the pro version to access most of this tool's features. The EvidenceHunt YouTube channel(external link) provides an overview of the workings of this AI tool.
GoThesis(external link)
This is an AI platform that helps users at different stages of their thesis writing, including research question/hypothesis generation, literature search, and writing help. It lists each of its functions as separate tools, and with the chat function, one can combine them. Some of its basic services are offered for free.
Jenni(external link)
Jenni AI is an AI-powered writing assistant tailored for academics, students, and researchers to streamline essay, paper, and thesis creation. It offers AI autocomplete for continuing sentences, PDF chat for analysing multiple papers, auto-citations, and editing tools like paraphrasing and tone review. Unlike other multi-purpose academic AI tools, Jenni primarily focuses on writing. There are free limits on daily word count, prompting upgrades for heavy use.
LeapSpace(external link)
LeapSpace is an AI platform developed by Elsevier, in collaboration with other leading academic publishers. It is powered mainly by Scopus data and full text from Elsevier and other major publishers. This is a fully subscription-based platform with a free seven-day preview. Now, NMIT is not subscribing to this platform.
Paperguide(external link)
The paper guide features a research agent capable of searching academic sources, tools for generating literature reviews and deep research reports and chats with documents. But to synthesise more than 20 articles to generate reviews or reports, a subscription is required.
SciSpace(external link)
SciSpace is an AI-powered research platform that helps students and researchers find, read, and write about academic literature. It can search papers using questions rather than keywords, explain complex text from PDFs, and support tasks such as data visualisation, note-taking, citation help, paraphrasing, and drafting.
Thesis AI(external link)
Thesis AI specialises in generating long documents from a single prompt. All its services are behind a paywall.
Google NotebookLM(external link)
It is an AI-powered assistant that grounds its responses primarily in user-uploaded sources such as PDFs, web links, and YouTube videos. It can create summaries, study guides, quizzes, mind maps, timelines, and even audio-video overviews based on the content from uploaded documents. It excels at synthesising insights from a large number of sources per notebook (50 for the free tier), making it ideal for literature reviews, note organisation, and learning without hallucinations from external data. Please note that it can use the integrated search function to add resources directly from the internet.
It generates multimedia outputs, such as video and audio overviews, podcasts and flashcards from research materials, and handles diverse formats to enable quick comprehension of complex topics. The free tier allows 100 notebooks with generous limits, sufficient for most student or researcher workflows
To get started, sign in at notebooklm.google.com using a Google account. Click "New notebook," then upload your sources to the notebook: PDFs, Docs/Slides, web URLs, YouTube videos, audio, or text files. You can also use the web search function to add resources to your notebook. Then, based on your queries, it can generate simplified, explanatory learning materials in various formats available in the Studio panel.
You have three panels in GNLM. Using the first panel, Source, you can upload your resources, such as journal articles and YouTube videos, to your notebook. The second panel is the Chat panel, which helps you interact with your sources, get summaries and reports, and extract insights. The third panel, Studio, helps you convert the content you generate into interactive outputs in various formats, such as audio and video overviews, reports, and infographics. This video(external link) introduces the basic functions of Google NotebookLM.
Microsoft Copilot(external link)
Microsoft Copilot is evolving beyond a simple chat interface into a research ecosystem. While the free version offers a powerful starting point for conversational AI, summarisation, and basic web queries, the premium Microsoft 365 Copilot licence unlocks "deep research" capabilities designed for complex academic projects. These premium features, such as advanced Notebooks for project organisation and the ability to generate audio overviews of research, are similar to the features available on Google NotebookLM.
The Microsoft Office 365 package subscription includes access to Copilot as well. If you use the NMIT MS Office 365 package, it also includes basic Copilot functionalities.
Many of NMIT’s library search interfaces have integrated AI functionalities in their workflows. NMIT’s main search interface, EBSCO DISCOVERY, features natural-language search powered by AI. Other databases, such as ProQuest and Science Direct, also feature AI chat functions and summarisation options.
Discovery(external link)
Under the Discovery search field, one can see the AI-assisted search option on the left-hand side. Instead of relying on complex keywords and Boolean operators, users can use natural language queries in the search field. AI will interpret your conversational questions to return relevant results.
Another AI option available in the Discovery search interface is the AI insights. “AI Insights” are available only for results whose full text is accessible on the EBSCO platform. You can see the “AI Insights” button under those results. AI Insights provides a summary of the document.
Using the “Ask This Document” feature is available via the AI Ask button, which appears below the search results for which this functionality is available. You can chat with the document to understand the article by asking questions that elicit a summary of the document or the study's methodology. Based on these answers, you can ask for further clarification. Users can chat with two documents at a time by opening two windows.
ProQuest(external link)
ProQuest Research Assistant is present in all ProQuest platforms NMIT subscribes to. It helps users create more effective searches by providing keyword suggestions that appear below the search box. When you open a document, the Research Assistant module opens on the right-hand side of the page. Apart from providing key takeaways of the document, such as essential details, findings, and conclusions, it also offers the option to visualise the topics discussed in the article. It also facilitates searches for more similar articles and searches powered by indexing terms.
This guide [PDF 6 MB] and the video(external link) from ProQuest provide more detailed information about the RA.
Science Direct(external link)
ScienceDirect features an AI-powered Reading Assistant that helps users gain insights into the article in question. When you open an article, you can see the Research Assistant button beside the document. It provides a set of sample questions a user could ask to better understand the article. Apart from this, it also provides the option to summarise the full articles or sections of them. You can also chat with the article to get more detailed information, such as its methodology and findings.
