Research and Course Guides: AI and Academic Research: Free AI Tools for Research

Free-to-Use AI Tools for Research

Consensus This link opens in a new window
An academic search engine, powered by AI, but grounded in scientific research. It attempts to surface the most relevant papers using topic-level and paper-level insights. Everything is connected to real research papers.

Elicit This link opens in a new window
Elicit is an AI tool to find 'seed articles' and to mine for keywords/subject headings. Elicit can find relevant papers without perfect keyword match, summarize takeaways from the paper specific to your question, and extract key information from the papers.

Undermind.ai
Advertised as a deep-dive research assistant, Undermind takes an iterative approach to AI research. It starts with and AI chat interview designed to help you refine your research question before performing a deep search of the Semantic Scholar database using your input, trying multiple versions of your search and adapting as it scans results.
NOTE: because of how the search works, results can take 3-5 minutes to come back, and the free version currently restricts how many searches you can run per month and sometimes limits access to citations it returns.