Forget Google Scholar

Forget Google Scholar. Here are seven AI-powered apps to fast-track your literature review.

1. Research Rabbit
2. Connected Papers
3. Inciteful
4. Litmaps
5. Elicit
6. Iris
7. Scite

Here's a comparison to help you choose the best one for your work:

1. Research Rabbit

• Helps you visualize connections between multiple papers
• Can create interactive graphs with one or more papers
• Helps you discover huge author networks
• You can make collections/folders of papers for better organization
• Extracts all references and citations from a given paper
• Integrates with Zotero

Pricing: Free

2. Connected Papers

• Takes a single paper and creates a graph of related papers
• Also lets you add another "origin" paper. That way you it will show you new papers that are related to both of your origin papers
• Graphs are not interactive
• Lets you save papers
• Saves your graph history 
• Gives you prior works, and derivative works
• No Zotero integration

Pricing:

Free: 5 graphs a month
Paid plan: $3/month (billed annually)

3. Inciteful

• Creates a graph of papers related to a single paper
• For best results, add five papers to the graph
• Prefers recently published papers over old ones
• Also gives you most important papers, review papers, and top authors related to your search
• Can't save papers in collections/folders
• Integrates with Zotero

Pricing: Free

4. Litmaps

• Creates maps of papers related to a single (seed) paper
• Discover funtion lets you discover more papers related to papers in a map
• X-axis: articles old to new; Y-axis: articles with most citations at the top
• Lets you save papers in collections/folders
• Integrates with Zotero

Pricing:

Free: 1 Litmap, 100 articles per Litmap, Basic Discover
Pro: $12.50/month Unlimited maps

5. Elicit

• Helps you brainstorm research questions
• Ask it a question and it will answer with references to published papers
• Gives you a table of papers related to your search question
• Shows you interventions and outcomes measured
• Doesn't create any graphs
• Can't save your papers in a collection
• No Zotero integration

Pricing: Free

6. Iris

• Gives you maps that group papers by concetps
• Unlike all other apps that have a bottom-up approach to literature review, Iris uses a top-down app approach
• Lets you save papers and build reading lists
• Saves all your graphs
• No Zotero integration

Pricing:

Free: Limited functionality
Paid: €75/month

7. Scite

• Gives you "Smart Citations:" number of citations that support/oppose and article's claims
• Has a Scite Assistant: it's like ChatGPT for academic research. Answers your questions with references to published papers
• Also visualizes connections between papers
• Integrates with Zotero

Pricing: €9.55/month (billed annually)

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