LibGuides: AI Tools for Academic Research: Home

Meredith College Library Guide to AI Research Tools

This guide provides information on a selection of AI tools that are primarily intended for academic research. Some of these tools are embedded in the library's subscribed resources, and others are free; most free tools require a paid subscription for access to full functionality.

The library does not directly subscribe to or endorse any of these tools, but librarians are happy to work with students and faculty to offer guidance and assistance on using AI for research.

More Information on AI Research Tools

ITHAKA Generative AI Product Tracker
A website maintained by ITHAKA, the organization that manages JSTOR, offering updated information on Gen AI products of relevance to teaching and research. The "Discovery Tools" section contains a variety of AI research tools.
Academic Search Engines Using Large Language Models (Aaron Tay)
A page maintained by a Data Services librarian at Singapore Management University, with information on a number of search tools that use LLMs to bring back academic information
AI in Universities and Colleges (JISC)
A frequently updated blog on AI in higher education from JISC, a UK educational technology organization.

AI Features in Meredith Library Databases

Some of the databases which Meredith's library subscribes to have begun to add AI features to their platforms--these are the ones which are currently available at Meredith:

JSTOR
JSTOR's AI Research Assistant can be activated by users who have created a personal login for JSTOR. It provides an alternative method of searching, and offers a chatbot which allows users to ask questions about the content of individual articles.
Statista
Statista's "Research AI" allows users to ask questions about data and statistics and receive detailed answers with citations linking to Statista content. Statista also offers a beta AI tool which provides shorter responses in chat environment

AI Search Engines for Academic Sources

These are some of the tooles that use AI for searching, summarizing and synythesizing of academic, information. To check whether Meredith has access sources found on these platforms, and to access those sources, you can enter their title into the library's OneSearch.

Consensus
A scholarly search that uses an LLM to search academic papers from Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, and the open web and provide summary responses to natural language searches. For yes/no questions, it offers a "Consensus Meter" which attempts to gauge whether there's a scholarly consensus on the question's answer.
Liner
A chatbot search which offers citations for all of its answers, with separate search options for scholarly and non-scholarly sources.
Elicit
A scholarly search tool that offers "top papers" in response to a search, using a table format to compare aspects of papers like conclusions and methodology.
Scite
A discovery tool which attempts to evaluate sources in terms of their agreement or disagreement with each other, looking at whether other articles provide "supporting" or "contrasting" evidence for a given source.
Semantic Scholar
Semantic Scholar is a collection of articles and citations that provides the underlying content used by many other academic AI research tools; it also allows "natural language" searching and provides brief AI-generated summaries of articles.

Literature Mapping Tools

These resources use AI to generate visual representations of academic research on a topic, both finding sources relevant to that topic, and showing relationships that exist between them.

Research Rabbit
A free literature mapping and discovery tool which uses "seed articles" to find additional information.
LitMaps
Another literature mapping and discovery tool, with a more polished interface than Research Rabbit but relatively limited options for non-paying users.
Connected Papers
A literature mapping tool similar to LitMaps, but with additional features for free users (iincluding up to 5 maps a month).