“AI is going to be the ultimate version of Google, it is not the research assistant we deserve but the one we need right now.”
AI-Powered research tools and AI language models are here and they are transforming academia. Now data scientists have turned their heads towards more interesting things before we humans are finally replaced for once and for all.
With AI, you as a student have the potential to transform your scientific, marketing, and all other types of research, citation, and information gathering into a much easier task. Having a powerful AI research assistant tool at your disposal gives you immense power, such as:
But finding the right academic research tool is a bit challenging, and thankfully, we are here to solve that problem for you. We have come up with a list of top 10 AI research assistant tools that will save both your time and money while giving you more accurate results. In this list, you have both free and paid options available; let’s explore each one of these to see which one suits your requirements the best.
From the name, you can make out what this AI research tool does; it simplifies the complex concepts that are present in research papers with the help of its AI model. This makes it much quicker for you to comprehend the main concepts of the research paper and take out the crucial notes that can be used in your research paper. It may not come as a surprise but earlier this particular software was known as ChatwithPDF, the rebranding took place in 2024, and from there it became Paperguide.
To use this AI research tool, all you need to do is upload the research paper as a PDF or paste the URL, then highlight the confusing text and let the AI do its job. The AI will explain the meaning without taking you back and forth between countless websites. It may not seem like it does a lot, but trust us when you upload a research paper in it, and it starts explaining to you all the vital concepts in a much simpler language, you will definitely feel like you have a buddy who is reading out a paper for you.
Features:
Price: It starts at free where you get 10 AI generations each day; the paid version starts from $9 a month, and has unlimited AI generations along with 10GB of cloud storage space.
Consensus makes the knowledge available on the internet accessible to you. It works as a search engine that is designed to scour through a number of research articles, papers, and even books for your scientific study. With this AI research assistant tool, you will be getting evidence-based answers at a much-accelerated pace, which ultimately leads to solving the problem of content overload.
Features:
Price: The free plan comes with 20 AI credits per month that can come in handy for pulling GPT-4 Summaries. The premium plan starts from $8.99.
Scispace is designed to help users understand research papers better, by providing summaries, explanations, and even providing answers to the follow-up questions. The AI tool comes with an intuitive UI and has tons of powerful features which makes it a great assistant for people writing research papers. Scispace is the one that revolutionized the way researchers interact with the academic texts that are part of research articles. Having this tool at your side will simplify complex concepts, and at the same time, it also streamline the literature review process.
Features:
Price: In the free version, you are getting limited chats with papers and with PDFs. The paid version starts at $8.30.
With this AI assistant tool for research, students can discover, access, read, listen, organize, and even share research from one of the fastest-growing repositories, which has over 250 million research articles and over 150 million peer-reviewed journal papers, along with 40 million open-access research papers that cover approximately 9.5 million topics across 32,000 journals. Researcher. Life is one place where top aggregators and publishers come to curate reading feeds. You can even bookmark specific parts of the paper, auto-sync your library with reference managers and at the same time collaborate with peers via shareable reading lists.
Features:
Price: The membership is completely free, but if you have to do anything more than just find research papers, then you have to go premium, which costs $7.50 a month, and it is billed annually, semi-annually and finally quarterly.
If you are new at writing research papers and reports you might have not heard the name of Semantic Scholar but stick around for a while and we are sure someone from a senior year or your professor will drop you a hint to use Semantic Scholar for your research.
It is a great AI assistant tool for individuals who are pursuing computer science, biomedical science, and neuroscience students. It takes advantage of natural language processing to trace out academic papers to find relevant content for researchers.
Features:
Price: Starts at free
This is an article summarizer for your research papers, articles, reports, and even for people who are writing their first novels. It will help you keep up with the latest research while making sure that you have quick access to relevant documents. This AI research assistant tool breaks down the information and the data into different categories, which it extracts from various research papers.
From this AI research tool you also get a summary flashcard of any word or a PDF document, moreover, it includes open-access versions of cited sources. You can also use it to take out figures, tables, and images from articles to display information so it gets easier for you to accommodate them in your research.
Features:
Price: Free and Scholarly plus is $4.99/ month.
Wordvice works more as your research paper writing assistant, and it is powered by one of the most up-to-date AI technologies. Using Wordvice AI, you get an all-in-one text editor that improves the overall quality of your written work, making it clearer and more precise regarding the topic that you have chosen. This AI research assistant tool is designed to focus more on academics and research writing, catering to all the writing needs of every student.
In this tool you also get an AI Proofreader that will fix all the grammatical errors like punctuation, style errors, and spelling fixes to make your research paper more impactful and streamlined. You can also take the advantage of a paraphrasing tool, and text summarizer to have originality and natural expressions that makes your research work authentic and plagiarism proof.
Features:
Price: Starts for free; premium plan is $9.95/ month.
With Afforai, you can find new research papers easily by using natural language inputs that come with the Semantic Scholar mode feature. The Afforai database is made up of 200 million peer-reviewed research papers. It comes with a document retrieval mode; Semantic
Scholar mode is for individuals who want to back up their citations, and Google search mode is in which you type in a question to get an answer from relevant sources on the internet. In addition to this, you can also use other AI models like Azure GPT-4 Omni, Azure GPT-4, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and other custom AI models.
Features:
Price: Starts for free; the student plan costs 9.99.
Named after great scientist and inventor Newton, this AI research assistant tool is for graduate students and scholars who are looking to personalize their learning experience. Using this AI tool, you get to generate educational content that matches your learning style and requirements. In this AI tool, you are going to learn interactively from videos, puzzles, infographics, and other means. It also analyzes your performance and how you study to come up with your strong and weak areas in real time.
Features:
Pricing: $10.95 + taxes a month.
If you want to make your data more visually appealing and easy to understand then Julius AI is your best bet. It is one of the most crucial AI tools that brings out the power of advanced data analytics and visualization to everyone no matter if they have any experience in the technical field or not.
From this AI research assistant tool, you will be interacting with your data files with simple natural language, just like you now used to chat with the AI-powered chatbot. For this feature to work, you first need to upload the content on the platform. Don’t worry. You can upload documents in any format. Still it will still be able to extract vital stats using regression modeling, projections, statistical analysis, and others. From complex 3D visualizations to data-filled geographic maps, you can visualize anything from your data using this AI assistant tool.
Features:
Pricing: Starts at $20 a month, which gives you 250 messages and includes all core features.
This is a unique AI research tool that gives the power to visualize different relationships between multiple academic papers. The representation of relationships was created in the form of graphs, thus making it easier for you to find out the influential work in addition to all the new research paths that you need to follow when writing your own research paper.
With the built-in tool of visual graph creation on co-citations and shared references, Connected Papers gives its users the ability to comprehensively explore a particular topic’s landscape. With this AI tool, you get to identify seminal works and understand the development of ideas over time, and you are able to dig deep into unsighted research papers that are groundbreaking and are less used in citations.
Features:
Price: Starts at free with 5 graphs per month; if you want more, you can go with the Academic plan for $3 a month, which gives unlimited graphs.
If you want to have an AI tool that can quickly help you reference research papers, then Mendeley is the perfect choice for you. It is used for organizing PDFs, crafting bibliographies, and annotating scholarly documents with accuracy. It also comes with a collaboration feature in which team members who are working on the same research paper can work together on this platform. Here, you will find all the standard academic procedures that you need to create an in-depth research paper.
Features:
Price: The basic software is free to use.
Last AI research tool that we have is Elicit which is developed by Ought and it utilizes language models using GPT-3 in order to automate parts of research’s workflows. You ask Elicit a question and the answer it produces has relevant papers along with their summaries of information.
Furthermore, the powerful AI model backing this platform can even find research papers for you without you having to provide exact keywords for them; this is done by taking assistance from semantic similarity to find research papers available on the internet that have some relevance to the questions you have asked. The user interface of the application is so intuitive and designed with so much thought that it will take you only the smallest amount of time to master it.
Features:
Price: It is free to use; you can still make donations if you want.
Here are a few of the things that you need to check or the tasks that your AI research assistant needs to complete in order to put up half the effort in your research.
Your AI assistant should be able to handle tasks such as setting up reminders, keeping track of to-do lists, and basically managing all necessary tasks that you will be performing on a regular basis when you are doing research.
The AI assistant has to be quick enough to provide answers to your questions, such as giving you insights on certain data that is available both online and uploaded by you on the platform. Furthermore, the AI assistant should be able to draft out customized citations and come up with useful online links that contain information similar to your research topic.
The best of the software or programs are the ones that are easy to navigate and intuitive at the same time. Even if you are not tech-savvy, it should get the job done for you; you should not feel that the AI research tool is too complicated to use in the first place.
Your AI research tool should be compatible enough to seamlessly connect with other software that you have been using. It can work on multiple devices, and operating systems as well without showcasing any form of lags or errors.
One of the last things that you need from software is a breach of your privacy. Your research paper has to be secure at all times, from start to finish. Your research paper holds sensitive data, and you might even want to use it to highlight your immense knowledge in that specific field. As a result, your AI research tool needs to be as secure as a bank’s gold vault.
Here are 3 best practices that can elevate your experience of using AI research assistants while you are still maintaining scientific rigor and keeping the integrity of research intact.
With the help of academic search engine capabilities, you can move past the usage of keyword searches. It will help you explore related concepts to your research when the exact terms do not match up.
You can easily chalk out the evolution of ideas by making relationships between various citations that you will be using. In addition to this, with the help of AI research tools you get to track down how the concepts you have mentioned are developing across different fields.
With the usage of proper AI research tools, you can even make theme-based research collections that use AI-powered categorization and can also deploy dynamic research maps. Here, you can tag papers based on multiple categories that are relevant to your research.
These were the top 10 AI research assistant tools that will help you write a research paper efficiently and quickly. If you have to ask us which one is the best among these, then we have to go with Elicit; it gets the job done for you, and that too at no cost.
So, after reading the list, we want you to first check out Elicit, and after using it, if you are still not satisfied, then start exploring the rest of the options that we have provided. Let us know which one is your favorite AI research assistant tool that made your PhD thesis and reporting much easier in the comment section below.