Below are some of the suggested AI-tools that uses RAG techniques to generate answers and allows generative AI to ingest information from reliable sources of information to create contextually relevant, timely, and more accurate responses.
The list is adopted from Tay, A. (2024, Aug.). List of academic search engines that use large language models for generative answers (updated to Aug 2024). Aaron Tay's Musings about Librarianship. https://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/p/list-of-academic-search-engines-that.html
| Tool | Access | Sources | LLM used | Cost | Uploading function | Produced literature review matrix? | Exporting Function | Other features |
| Consensus | Account set-up is encouraged | Semantic Scholar | GPT-4-powered scientific summaries | Free, with some limitations | No | No, has Consensus meter | Yes | Also exists as free CustomGPT if you have ChatGPT+ |
| SciSpace | Account set-up is encouraged | OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar and their own crawlers that crawl websites, repositories like Arxiv, Bioarxiv of around 200 million documents | ChatGPT | Free, with some limitations | Yes | Yes | Yes | Also exists as free Custom GPT (if you have ChatGPT+) |
| Undermind.ai | Account set-up is encouraged | Semantic Scholar | GPT 4 | Free, with some limitations | No | No, but can provide summary, categories of papers, citation network, results with relevancy score, and coverage estimation. | Yes |
Deep search - does iterative searching, citation searching and uses GPT4 to 'read' and judge for inclusion Models and estimates % of papers relevant Classifies papers into categories and provides timeline and citation graph High relevancy results but at cost of speed. |
| Scite | Account set-up is encouraged | Scite.ai's own index - Open Scholarly metadata and citation statements from selected partners | "We use a variety of Language models depending on situation." GPT3.5 (generally), GPT4 (enterprise client), Claude instant (fallback) | 7-day free trial | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Summaries include text from citation statements Edit search used Many options to control what is being cited including number of references, journals cited, type of publication cited, to cite from a list of publications etc. |
| Elicit | Account set-up is encouraged | Semantic Scholar | OpenAI GPT models & other opensource LLMs | Free, with some limitations | Yes | Yes | Yes for paid accounts | List of concept search |
| The Literature | No | PubMed | GPT 4 | Free | No | Yes | Yes (via PubMed) | Able to control Literature Search (PubMed Boolean) to be used in analysis |
| Answerthis.io | Account set-up is encouraged | No mentioned of source except:
Comprehensive Source Coverage: Includes academic journals, research databases, internet sources, preprints, books, technical reports, and conference proceedings/ |
Unknown | Free, with some limitations | Yes (max of 8 document uploads for free version) | Yes (max of 6 literature reviews) | Yes |
"The World’s Best Research Assistant" : intelligent paper search, smart library organization, and rapid literature reviews |
| Lumina | Account set-up is encouraged | Open Alex | Claude 3 Haiku / OpenAI Sonnet | Free | No | No but AI summary | No |
Filter by journal, Source type, SJR Quartile, Citation |
| System Pro | Account set-up is encouraged | PubMed | Medical only, highly validated system, Use synthesis mode to generate summary of studies. |
Free | No | No but with research synthesis | No | 4 modes. Besides synthesis mode there is |
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"To access our Services, we may ask you to create an account." | OpenScholar Datastore (OSDS) which includes 45 million papers from Semantic Scholar + 237 million passages/embeddings formulated by experts | OpenScholar 8B (based on Llama 3.1 8B) "Outperfoms GPT-4 and Llama 3.1 70B." | Free (demo) | No | No, but can provide a summary and list of references | No |
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| Ai2 ScholarQA (Beta) |
Free access
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Semantic Scholar/ S2ORC (Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus with 8 million academic papers) + mostly ArXiV papers | Claude Sonnet 3.5 | Beta version | No | Yes (literature comparison table) | No |
- iterative, deep searching with a cost of speed - quote extraction - answer outline and clustering - report generation |
| Perplexity | Account set-up is encouraged |
Internet in real-time. Search results include: academic journals, research databases, internet sources, preprints, books, technical reports, and conference proceedings/ |
Claude 3.5, GPT-4o, and Sonar | Free, with some limitations | Yes | Yes | Yes |
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Gu, J. (2024, Mar. 20). Five AI research tools that referencing genuine sources reviews. Research Bridge. https://library.hkust.edu.hk/sc/ai-tools-with-genuine-sources/
Tay, A. (2024, Aug.). List of academic search engines that use large language models for generative answers (updated to Aug 2024). Aaron Tay's Musings about Librarianship. https://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/p/list-of-academic-search-engines-that.html
Zeichick, A. (2023, Sept. 19). What is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)?. OCI. https://www.oracle.com/artificial-intelligence/generative-ai/retrieval-augmented-generation-rag/
Zhao, A. (2024, Mar. 20). Trust in AI: Evaluating Scite, Elicit, Consensus, and Scopus AI for generating literature reviews. Research Bridge. https://library.hkust.edu.hk/sc/trust-ai-lit-rev/