Lineberger Memorial Library

Recent advances in artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT among others, have led to a number of new online research apps that can be useful for students and faculty. Below are some videos introducing and evaluating some of these services. 

1. Semantic Scholar

Free and very useful, this was the first of the new breed of research tools. It indexes and analyzes over 200 million papers to enrich the citation information, creating a massive network graph of these connections. The results of this analysis are then freely available via the web and as an API. As a result, all other AI research tools make use of this data in their products.

2. Consensus

Consensus has a simple aim: to synthesize complex information from multiple research papers into an answer of yes, no, or maybe. It uses Semantic Scholar and GPT-4 to analyze the text and produce this summation. This can be seen as somewhat simplified given the complexity of all subjects, but it is a useful tool for reviews with some good features.

3. Research Rabbit

Committed to being free, Research Rabbit builds on Semantic Scholar data to produce network graphs that can be manipulated to visualize citation connections between research papers. It integrates well with Zotero and is a very useful discovery tool for all kinds of scholarly research.

4. Elicit

Definitely one of the frontrunners in the field, Elicit uses Semantic Scholar data and GPT-4 to extract clinical research data from multiple papers into columns, allowing for immediate comparison on any needed variable. It can also extract concepts across papers and provide sources for each.