Research Guides: PHYS 471: Capstone EPAD Project: Useful New or Advanced Research Tools

Interested in Using ChatGPT for Your Research and Creation?

There's been a lot of hype and fear about generative AI tools like ChatGPT. If you're interested in using these tools for research and creating your projects, check out the following guides!

Generative AI: Supporting AI Literacy, Research, and Publishing
by Anna Milholland Last Updated Apr 15, 2024 273 views this year

Useful Advanced Search and Visualization Tools

Not all AI research tools are generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Many of the tools below may be using some combination of machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing and more to find and visualize the research literature. Note: Many of these tools are experimental and are in beta (or alpha) so consider them pilots, not the last word for comprehensive searching. All of these are freely available or have a free tier. For more information on some of these see this presentation.

Scite This link opens in a new window
"Scite is an award-winning platform for discovering and evaluating scientific articles via Smart Citations. Smart Citations allow users to see how a publication has been cited by providing the context of the citation and a classification describing whether it provides supporting or contrasting evidence for the cited claim." Scite also does reference checking, can create custom dashboards and alerts, and more. Create an account with your W&M email to access all features. Scite has a free browser plug in and also integrates into Zotero. Scite is also trying to integrate chatbot features based on the literature, not the internet (Scite Assistant - in beta) so it can provide correct citations though always double check that they say what the citation says they are saying. Also it allows you to adjust Assistant responses. Find tutorials on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCso9-KdHZ6vfbYgM59zp9EA

Research Rabbit Research discovery app. Uses seed papers to suggest possibly relevant papers. Can also connect Zotero and can visualize networks as well as trace citation chains and similar articles and authors.
Connected Papers Explore connected papers in a visual graph by entering a paper identifier. Useful for producing visualizations of networks of papers.
Consensus Question-based search - ask a question to mine answers from research papers. Focused on health but expanding to questions in other areas (with caveats about accuracy). See Consensus’ best practices: https://consensus.app/home/blog/maximize-your-consensus-experience-with-these-best-practices/. Tries to pull out quotes and synthesize
Dimensions "Dimensions is a linked research knowledge system that re-imagines discovery and access to research. Developed by Digital Science in collaboration with over 100 leading research organizations around the world, Dimensions brings together grants, publications, citations, alternative metrics, clinical trials, patents and policy documents to deliver a platform that enables users to find and access the most relevant information faster, analyze the academic and broader outcomes of research, and gather insights to inform future strategy. For more information about the product have a look at our support site or visit https://dimensions.ai."
Elicit "Elicit is a research assistant using language models like GPT-3 to automate parts of researchers’ workflows. Currently, the main workflow in Elicit is Literature Review. If you ask a question, Elicit will show relevant papers and summaries of key information about those papers in an easy-to-use table." Uses elements of earlier versions of GPT as well as other tools to find a smaller selection of relevant papers to answer a question and summarizes them. Often health-care related; may want to use to build a broad bibliography in heath areas. Built by Ought, a non-profit machine learning research lab using the Semantic Scholar database. Initially gives you eight papers (not only based on keyword matching but also semantic similarity) and summarizes them (creates its own abstracts). Helps find initial leads, answer questions, find research directions. Can search by study type and add information like interventions and outcomes. Not for comprehensive search and favors empirical scientific and social scientific topics.
Inciteful Tool for finding literature in two ways - not only useful for analyzing and visualizing networks of literature but also for seeing papers that bridge between two different subject areas (useful for interdisciplinary research).
Keenious Find research relevant to documents. Uses “seed” document in PDF, link or pasted text. Ranks based on relevance, shared terms, and predicted meaning. Gives related articles. Can filter by date, citation count and keyword and gives topics covered by that article and related ones. Can get add in for Word and Gdocs to have it analyze your own text and suggest articles, even for specific sections. NOTE: save your results (full text PDFs) as you go since there is limited bookmarking and citation export capability.
LitMaps Literature review software. Search, discover, visualize and analyze the literature.
R Discovery With tools like RDiscovery you can get literature recommendation sent to a dashboard feed (which also produces email alerts). You give it topics you’re interested in and it will populate a feed with articles it things are relevant (though your mileage may vary).
Semantic Scholar Science-focused search. Can filter by field/subject, date, availability of PDF, author, and journal or conference. Provides short AI-generated abstract summaries and ability to see highly cited papers quickly. Provides paper recommendations and alerts and has beta research tools.
Lens.org "Serves linked open knowledge artefacts and metadata with tools to inform effective, efficient and equitable problem solving." Not AI based. Also useful for the patent literature.

Visual Search and Visualization Tools

2D Search
Visual advanced search
Open Knowledge Maps
Allows users to map a research topic
VOSViewer
Software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks
CiteSpace
Downloadable sofware. Not AI-based.

PHYS 471: Capstone EPAD Project

Interested in Using ChatGPT for Your Research and Creation?

Useful Advanced Search and Visualization Tools

Visual Search and Visualization Tools

Further Reading