Semantic Scholar

Can help you: 

• Discover research by searching a large, multidisciplinary index; similar to Google Scholar but with better filtering and content transparency

• Quickly grasp the overview of an article through AI-generated TLDR summaries 

• Identify potentially relevant and important sources through filters and sort options

• Understand how a reference has been used by other researchers with the article section filter

Pros:

• Research dashboard similar to personal database accounts

• Commitment to remaining free

• Active development of ancillary tools including an article reader 

• Easy to use, intuitive interface

Cons:

• No advanced search options; not compatible with Boolean and wildcard strategies 

• No natural language searching; searches by keyword only

When in the research process might you use Semantic Scholar? 

• Similar to when a researcher might use Google Scholar at the beginning or end of the research process, or when struggling to locate research publications

• To help inform your selection and use of sources

Research Rabbit 

Can help you: 

• Discover new research related to a seed paper or small collection of publications 

• Visualize and explore networks of references and cited by publications

• Visualize and explore networks of authors 

• Find key researchers within an area, their works, and their connections with other researchers

Pros:

• The horizontally scrolling interface fosters backtracking as you explore networks

• Provides paper and author recommendations

• Can create shareable collections

• Commitment to remaining free

• Compatible with Zotero

Cons:

• Works best when you start with a set of key papers or researchers (so should have this first) 

• Has some issues with author name ambiguity or changes

• Best to begin with a publication rather than a keyword search 

• The metadata, including abstracts and author info, displays in a very messy way, so it can be difficult to see what an article is actually about at a glance

When in the research process might you use Research Rabbit? 

• When starting from a seed paper or set of papers and would like to more explore across citation and author networks 

• When you would like to map the scholarly conversation to see the “bigger picture”

• When interested in finding key researchers

• When a traditional literature search only yields a single or a few results 

Elicit

Can help you: 

• Find research that might address your specific research question

• Quickly review publications through AI-generated summaries that note relevancy to your research question

• Compare and contrast publications discovered in Elicit, or your own collection of pdfs

• Extract common elements of a paper, such as hypothesis, theoretical framework, variables, future research directions

• Synthesize research findings

• Identify key concepts within an area of research

Pros:

• Natural language searching

• Integration with Semantic Scholar 

• Transparency around Elicit’s potential limitations

Cons:

• Prompts require a research question versus a keyword or topic search 

• Data/content extraction does not appear to be available for every publication 

• Basic publication data (journal title, format, etc.)  is not consistently available

• AI integration offers the opportunity to fail or provide misleading information more so than other tools

When in the research process might you use Elicit? 

• Jumping off point in the beginning of your research process 

• During the literature review process 

• Towards the end of your literature search to compare and contrast publications or quickly extract data