Skip to Main Content
Albert S. Cook Library

Research Tech: AI, Citations, Data, and More

This guide provides an overview of technology that supports every stage of the academic process—from reading and organizing sources to conducting literature reviews, managing citations, analyzing data, and sharing research.

AI-Enhanced Literature Reviews

Generative artificial intelligence aka Gen AI tools such as SciSpace and Elicit can help you construct tables and automatically extract data from sources you've identified for inclusion in your literature review. These tools do not store, share, or train on any sources you upload.

Although these tools claim to be able to discover sources, they do not in fact have access to all the sources library databases do. As such, if you choose to use Gen AI tools for literature discovery, it should be in supplement to your library database searching.

SciSpace

5 Tips for SciSpace

  1. Expect Free Plan Limitations: The free plan doesn't allow file exports or full table copying. Work around this by copying one column or row at a time to capture the information you need.
  2. Leverage the "Methods Used" Columns: Even when not analyzing research studies aka empirical papers, the "Methods Used" column is valuable for identifying theories, frameworks, and less common methodologies like reflection or reflexivity in your sources.
  3. Add Citations Manually: SciSpace can't generate citations for uploaded PDFs due to limited metadata access. When exporting to a spreadsheet, create a new column and paste citations from your citation management software.
  4. Use Section Summaries: The Summary feature, available in the Files column, creates helpful bullet-point summaries of each article section, maintaining the original headings in an outline format to help you quickly identify relevant content.
  5. Choose the Right Question Format: Chat with individual PDFs or entire collections for quick 5-7 bullet point answers to simple questions. For more comprehensive responses, use "Ask a question / Get insights for questions from your files" search bar to get longer, mini-paper formatted insights that are approximately twice the length of Chat responses.

ResearchRabbit

Whereas SciSpace works well for extracting data from PDFs to help you determine whether a source is worth reading closely and fits your research methodology, ResearchRabbit works well for discovery new literature and authors by visualizing researcher communities and scholarly trends.

5 Tips for ResearchRabbit

  1. Academic Articles Only: ResearchRabbit works exclusively with scholarly journal articles. If you upload other source types (like blog posts or videos), you'll get an error code in the Selection panel. Simply delete these directly in ResearchRabbit without affecting your Zotero library.
  2. Enable Abstracts: Always select the "Abstracts" box to see brief descriptions of each article. ResearchRabbit defaults to the "Comments" box, but abstracts provide much more valuable context about each paper's content.
  3. Use Filters Strategically: The Filter bar is your friend! Refine your results with relevant keywords (like "slow" when researching slow technology) to focus on exactly what you need.
  4. Sort by Citations: When exploring results, sorting by citation count reveals the most influential papers in your field. This is especially helpful for identifying landmark studies that new researchers should definitely read.
  5. Export Your Findings: Save your work by exporting directly from ResearchRabbit. You can save visualizations as PNG images and export paper lists in BibTeX, RIS, or CSV formats for your reference management system.

Plan Your Expert Literature Review

Did you know there are many different types of literature reviews? The type you choose to do will depend upon many different factors such as project timeline, scope of your research question, discipline, research methodology, and of course your overall objective!

Evidence Synthesis Screening and Data Extraction