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This guide © 2024 by UCL - Library Skills is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
There are increasing numbers of GenAI tools designed to help you identify academic research, many of which incorporate GenAI functionality to provide summaries of information from the original sources or act as a research assistant. Increasingly we will see similar features integrated into established library databases and search tools. Most new or emerging tools are free to use at a basic level but require a subscription for full functionality.
These can be useful starting points to scope your search, but do not allow for comprehensive or systematic literature searching. We recommend using these types of tool only to complement your use of reliable search tools, such as UCL Explore and library databases.
Always think critically about your use of these types of tool:
The following are examples of these types of tools, and not recommendations. UCL does not have a subscription to any of these, but you may find them useful as alternative tools for your research.
Consensus is an AI / LLM-powered search scientific academic search engine. It sources data from the Semantic Scholar dataset (which includes 200 million peer-reviewed documents across all domains of science). It analyses the most relevant papers and generates a summary of key findings.
It also includes an integrated ChatGPT-style assistant, Consensus Copilot, which will answer questions, draft content, create lists, and more.
UCL does not have a subscription to Consensus but you can carry out three free searches without creating an account, after which you can create a free account with limitations on the AI-enabled functionality, or subscribe for full functionality.
Keenious is a tool to analyse the content of a document using large language models, and generates a list of relevant documents. It can be embedded in Microsoft Word or Google Documents, or use an uploaded file. The results are weighted by percieved relevance and similarity. Suggested papers can then be filtered by age, citation counts, or open access status, and the list can be exported for analysis or for import into a citation management tool.
This can be used to find similar research to a paper you are reading, or to help identify potential works connected to your own ongoing research.
UCL does not have a subscription to Keenious, but a limited-access account is available to individuals for free, or an expanded account with fewer restrictions for a monthly fee.
Scite is a wide-ranging AI-supported tool. Its core feature is identifying and classifying citations based on whether the text surrounding them supports the cited work, is in contrast to it, or merely mentions it in passing. This allows it to factor this into citation-based searches and metrics, in a way that is not possible with most citation databases, and may mean you get more relevant and useful results.
Scite also offers an AI "search assistant", which tries to generate an answer to a question with citations to supporting literature. This is generally of good quality, and it is good for a summary overview, but should be treated with caution - it may have omissions and inaccuracies, and we would not recommend using it as your only search method. AI assistant tools like this often select the papers to highlight in a very idiosyncratic way, and may miss key papers.
UCL does not have a subscription to Scite, but individual users can register an account for a monthly fee.
Other new or emerging AI-powered search tools include citation network tools, which make connections between academic studies but do not utilise GenAI, although may do in the future. Again, these can be useful for starting or expanding your search for literature on your topic, but should not be used as a substitute for established library databases and search tools. Examples include Connected Papers and Research Rabbit.
