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/
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? | Other features |
| Consensus | Account set-up is encouraged | Semantic Scholar | GPT-4-powered scientific summaries | Free, with some limitations | No | No, has Consensus meter | 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 | 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. |
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 |
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 | List of concept search |
| The Literature | No | PubMed | GPT 4 | Free | No | Yes | Able to control Literature Search (PubMed Boolean) to be used in analysis |