Artificial Intelligence Faculty Committee

Perplexity - www.perplexity.ai

• Perplexity is a ChatGPT-like AI search engine. Like ChatGPT, you can type in prompts and Perplexity will summarize its findings. Perplexity is designed to be focused more on research and it often includes clickable links to its sources. However, it suffers from the same "hallucinations" as ChatGPT and other genAI engines.

Literature Mapping Tools

These tools let you discover scholarly articles by searching for connections with other articles. Those connections include authors, citations and content.

ResearchRabbit - researchrabbitapp.com

• ResearchRabbit is an AI-powered tool specifically designed for academic research, allowing users to visualize connections between research papers through citation analysis. It displays the connections visually using a graph.
• review:  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10403115/.  Excerpts:  "[ResarchRabbit] lets users discover publications related to one or more seed publications with the help of visualization maps and lists of earlier, later, and similar publications... While ResearchRabbit uses PubMed’s and Semantic Scholar’s search engines, the company claims its unique database of '100s of millions of academic articles' is second in size only to Google Scholar... Once publications are in a collection, ResearchRabbit’s algorithm will begin generating recommendations. These recommendations can be explored through two modes: 1) by Papers that are Similar work, Earlier work, or Later work or 2) by People that provide additional publications that These authors or Suggested authors have published These recommendations are depicted using visualization maps... ResearchRabbit currently limits exploration to a single linear path and leaves users to remember which branching paths of authors and citations they have already explored. The interface does not provide the means to save a rabbit hole for later exploration, nor does it provide a means for users to mark publications they have already come across, unless they are in one of the user’s collections. The author visualization maps have some trouble with author disambiguation. It is not uncommon in ResearchRabbit for a single author to appear as two nodes in a collaboration network, each of which is associated with different publication and citation numbers."

Elicit - elicit.com

• Use AI to search, summarize, extract data from, and "chat" with over 125 million papers.
• review:  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10089336/.  Excerpts:  "Ideal for evidence synthesis and text extraction, Elicit pulls publications from Semantic Scholar and expedites the literature review process. Users enter a research question into the search box and the AI attempts to identify the top papers in the field. The AI can find relevant papers without perfect keyword matching, summarize takeaways from the paper, and extract key information into a research matrix." and "Elicit is limited to publications in Semantic Scholar so there is a gap in the literature on what is being retrieved. For example, Semantic Scholar does not search licensed journals or behind paywalls and a recent study in 2018 found that Google Scholar contained 389 million records while Semantic Scholar had 40 million records "

Reference Management

Zotero - www.zotero.org

• "Zotero is a free desktop and web citation manager that provides extensive tools to add, organize, and share your citations. It is straightforward to use and has comparable features on the desktop version to paid citation managers. All accounts have access to collaborative group libraries. The Zotero Connector browser extensions allow you to add citations to your library with one click and is available for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Zotero uses your computer's storage to save citations and can sync data across devices and back it up using cloud storage. You can take notes and edit PDFs in the app. Zotero comes with 300 MB of cloud storage for free with paid storage upgrades." from https://libguides.memphis.edu/citations/about-zotero
• review:  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11636089/. This review describes using Zotero for undergraduate research mentoring.

The following articles discuss the efficacy of ChatGPT and other genAI tools for professional writing:

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10760418/ - Excerpts from the abstract:  "We selected 30 basic research papers from Nature, Genome Biology, and Biological Psychiatry. Excluding abstracts, we inputted the full text into ChatPDF, an application of a language model based on ChatGPT, and we prompted it to generate abstracts with the same style as used in the original papers. A total of 8 experts were invited to evaluate the quality of these abstracts (based on a Likert scale of 0-10) and identify which abstracts were generated by ChatPDF, using a blind approach. These abstracts were also evaluated for their similarity to the original abstracts and the accuracy of the AI content. The quality of ChatGPT-generated abstracts was lower than that of the actual abstracts... Among the 30 ChatGPT-generated abstracts, 3 showed wrong conclusions, and 10 were identified as AI content. The mean percentage of similarity between the original and the generated abstracts was not high (2.10%-4.40%). The blinded reviewers achieved a 93% (224/240) accuracy rate in guessing which abstracts were written using ChatGPT.

The following table is adapted from the article "How to optimize the systematic review process using AI tools" available at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11143948/. It explores AI tools for generating a literature review for a given topics.

The following table summarizes the use of AI tools for writing different parts of a literature review.