Best AI Tools for Writing Research Papers
Researchers around the world have already started using AI tools to streamline their work, writing is an important part of that.
AI tools can excel at all kinds of writing, research papers included. This is because, as part of their training, these algorithms have read more research papers than any human could do. And so, they’ve learned the structure, language, and nuances of research papers.
That being said, we aren’t advising anyone to create a research paper purely by using one of these tools. We do advise their use to speed things up and fill out the missing details and boring parts or to create drafts of entire sections.
That being said, here are the best AI tools for writing research papers you can use today:
Semantic Scholar by AI2
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- Lets you easily find research papers
- Keep up with the latest research on just about any subject under the sun
- Semantic Reader is convenient for non-academic folks
- There are no mobile apps
Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered tool designed to help researchers navigate scientific literature. It works as a searchable database of scientific papers from all fields of study, making it easier to find relevant information quickly and efficiently. With over 212 million papers from various fields of science, it is a rich source of knowledge; so, whether you’re a researcher, a student, or just someone interested in learning more about a particular scientific topic – you’ll find Semantic Scholar helpful.
The technology behind the tool utilizes AI to help sort, filter, and present relevant information in a way that’s more digestible and accessible. The AI also aids in processing the vast amount of data in the scientific literature to deliver the most relevant results.
One of the cool features of Semantic Scholar is the Semantic Reader, which is an augmented reading tool that aims to augment the way people read and interact with scientific papers. It makes scientific reading more accessible and richly contextual — offering an enhanced reading experience that can be particularly beneficial for complex or dense scientific literature.
Also provided is the API that allows developers to integrate Semantic Scholar’s paper search capabilities into their applications.
Semantic Scholar is based at the Allen Institute for AI, indicating its roots in a leading AI research organization.
SciSpace by PubGenius Inc.
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- Get answers from 272 million research papers
- Citation generator is a true time-saving tool
- The browser extension is a must-have tool for researchers
- AI-generated explanations might lack depth
SciSpace is one of those indispensable services for modern researchers. It’s actually a collection of different AI-powered tools that together make researchers’ lives that much easier.
For instance, it is a search engine curated for science, providing relevant answers from 272 million papers. Some of the questions you can ask include “How does climate change impact biodiversity?”, “Why are aging COVID patients more susceptible to severe complications?”, “How does social media affect the college selection process?”, “What are the interesting theories about dark matter and dark energy?”, and so on and on.
In addition, SciSpace lets you upload a research paper (PDF) and get answers backed by citations.
Speaking of citations, the tool provides a generator for them. Pick a source — upload a file, paste text or enter a URL — and select a citation style. There are more than 2,500 citation styles to choose from, including popular ones such as American Psychological Association 7th edition, Modern Language Association 9th edition, Begell House – Chicago Manual of Style, Elsevier – Vancouver, and many others.
There is also the Scholarly Paraphrasing Tool that can make your academic writing more clear, allowing you to write in more tones and languages than the popular rephrasing tool Quillbot.
Plus, we have an Academic AI Detector that can catch GPT-generated content and the ever-handy Chrome extension that lets you bring SciSpace’s tools with you across the web.
Consensus
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- Nicely designed website, easy to use
- Big database with over 200 million research papers
- Not just for researchers
- GPT-4 summaries are not available for free
Consensus is on a mission to democratize expert knowledge. It does that through its AI-powered search engine to deliver evidence-based answers and find insights in research papers.
You can, for instance, ask Consensus questions such as “Does creatine help build muscle?,” “Can mindfulness improve sleep?”, and “Do direct cash transfers reduce poverty?”.
Beyond researchers, Consensus could also help students find supporting evidence for your paper, clinicians – find answers to patients’ questions; analysts – get expert quotes for presentations; content creators – source peer-reviewed insights for your blog; and health and fitness enthusiasts – check the viability of supplements and routines.
All being said, we are not surprised to learn that the tool has more than half a million users (September 2023) — including researchers, students, doctors, professionals, and evidence-conscious consumers.
Among them are researchers from the world’s top institutions, such as Merck, NASA, NIH, Princeton University, UCLA, University of Michigan, Stanford, Pfizer, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, IEEE, University of Virginia, Johnson & Johnson, McKinsey & Company, and others.
Scholarcy
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- Makes long text short(er) and easier to grasp
- Saves hours and hours of research
- Even though it's made for researchers, students will love it just as well
- It's primarily made for researchers, for others - there are better solutions out there
Scholarcy is an AI-powered summarizer tool ideal for heavy readers of texts from across the Interwebs.
One of its key audiences are researchers who are having a hard time keeping up with the latest research. For them, going through millions of new research articles published each year could be a nightmare. That is not the case with Scholarcy, which can summarize all that text with ease — saving hundreds of hours along the way.
The tool will go beyond paraphrasing abstracts and is also capable of extracting the key facts, figures and more in seconds. It does that by creating a summary flashcard of any article, report or document in Word or PDF format. Moreover, Scholarcy also includes links to open-access versions of cited sources and can be configured to extract figures, tables and images.
What makes it even better is Scholarcy’s browser extension that will let you summarize the world wide web. So, whenever you find an interesting article online, you can summarize it with a single click without leaving your browsers.
In that sense, beyond different researchers, Scholarcy could also be an indispensable tool for journalists, students, and librarians, among others.
Jenni
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- Lets you write up to 10 times faster
- Includes support for multiple languages
- Chat with PDFs comes included
- Mobile support is still not there
Jenni is an AI-powered service for researchers, designed to help them “supercharge their next research paper.”
Instead of doing it all by yourself, you can use Jenni’s AI assistant to get suggestions whenever you are stuck or expand your notes into full paragraphs. As a result, you can write up to 10 times faster while making sure you are crafting the original work.
This is made possible with Jenni’s autocomplete features, as well as its ability to paraphrase and rewrite content for you. Heck, you can even start with your PDF files and even chat with them to uncover insights with ease.
All in all, there is a reason why Jenni is used by more than 1 million academics and writers. As of September 2023, it has helped write over 970 million words — from academic essays, journals, to top-ranking blog posts.
Among the organizations using Jenni are the University of Cambridge, MIT, Aston University, University of Melbourne, Harvard University, and Google, to name a few.
How can AI tools for writing research papers help you?
For starters, they can write for you, but that’s just a start. Here are some of the ideas on how you can use these tools:
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Generating hypotheses
Because of their capability to analyze all kinds of data, AI tools can identify patterns and relationships that may not be immediately apparent. This can then lead to the generation of new hypotheses you can use in your research paper.
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Analyzing data
AI tools are great for going through vast amounts of data than humans and then generating trends and patterns. Moreover, they can also go beyond analysis to show predictions based on the same data. This can help researchers plan their work ahead.
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Drafting research papers
Like that’s the case with any AI tool for writing, you can use these tools to create an initial version of your research paper. The best part is that these tools don’t start from a blank sheet but rather from the data you provide them. However, they can also take a single sentence as an input to create entire chapters.
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Summarizing
Say you want to understand another research paper and use its findings on your own – why not ask AI to summarize that other research paper for you? This will create a shorter version of that paper you can then use in your research.
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Visualizations
If data could be presented with a graph or a chart, you can use an AI tool that can do that for you with a simple text prompt. Then, use these newly created graphics in your research paper.
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Write entire chapters
As we’ve noted above, we aren’t supporting the writing of an entire research paper by AI. However, you can use it to draft entire chapters – which you can later rewrite to your liking.
All in all, we believe that AI makes writing research papers much easier, and we expect the majority of researchers to use these tools to publish better papers soon enough. And that’s a good thing, right?