While the marketing line “Do hours of researching in minutes” appeals to students who want to save time, the unfortunate side is that there is a lot lost when everything is summarized. There is depth and nuance that get stripped out when a tool transforms a 20-page article into a 20-second read.
The other major issue with these tools is that they are not always accurate. Many of them pull from the SemanticScholar database, which is not uniform in its approach to tagging data sources. This puts a needed task of verifying information for anyone using a large language model, which isn’t too difficult if you are using it in a domain you are familiar with. But students who are unfamiliar with research will have the hardest time and unfortunately are the most likely to use it.
GPT-4o (OpenAI): Released in May 2024, GPT-4o is a multimodal model with text, image, video, and voice capabilities. It's 50% cheaper and 2x faster than its predecessor, with an upcoming Voice-to-Voice function promising improved response times.
Claude 3.5 (Anthropic): Launched in March 2024, Claude 3.5 Sonnet maintains a 200,000 token context window at a lower cost. It outperforms GPT-4o in coding and text reasoning benchmarks and features advanced vision capabilities.
DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek): Released in January 2025, this open-source model excels in math and coding, matching or surpassing OpenAI o1 in several benchmarks. It boasts 671 billion total parameters with 37 billion active parameters.
Grok-2 (xAI): While still in beta as of August 2024, Grok-2 reportedly outperforms GPT-4o in various categories such as GPQA, MMLU-Pro, and DocVQA1.
Llama 3.1 (Meta AI): Released in June 2024, this open-source model features 405 billion parameters and an expanded context length of 128,000 tokens. It has been trained on over 15 trillion tokens and supports additional languages.
Elicit: An AI assistant for researchers and academics that automates literature reviews, finds relevant papers, and summarizes key findings.
Consensus: An AI-powered academic search engine that covers over 200 million research papers across all domains of science. It provides instant insights, time-saving AI features, and helps users find the most relevant papers quickly.
Scite: An AI tool built for research needs, allowing users to ask questions and get answers backed by millions of citations. It offers features like customizable research tracking, reference checking, and comprehensive journal insights.
Scispace: A platform that combines a science workspace with a digital library, offering access to over 200 million research papers. It features an AI-powered literature review tool and collaborative workspace capabilities.
ResearchRabbit: A citation-based literature mapping tool that helps users find papers relevant to their topic of interest.
Iris.ai: A comprehensive platform for research processing, offering smart search, auto-generated summaries, and data extraction.
Lateral: A tool that allows users to import relevant papers and find similar ones matching their research topic
PaperGuide.ai: An AI-powered research tool (mentioned in the list of top AI tools for research).
Research Buddy: An AI-powered tool that generates comprehensive academic literature reviews with Harvard referencing.
Scholarcy: A tool that helps researchers analyze and extract key information from academic papers.
This content was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence and carefully reviewed and refined by humans to ensure accuracy and quality.