LibGuides: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Guide for CCSU: AI Tools for Research & Learning

There are many "Artificial Intelligence" tools that people use for research and learning. Challenges often arise in the use of generative AI / Large Language Models-based chatbots (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude) when applied to scholarly research. Issues may include "hallucinations" -- fabrications of information that may sound credible but turn out to be untrue, e.g., citations for articles that do not exist, as well as issues related to bias and data privacy. Uninformed use of this type of AI can create challenges for students when it comes to academic integrity, plagiarism, and the failure to cite the role of AI in content production. Legal questions about intellectual property (copyright) and generative AI can also be thorny. Students should consult with their professors and librarians. Some AI tools are designed specifically for research and can be helpful in finding and evaluating scholarly information. Below, we have a list of some of these AI research tools.

As of Oct. 1st, 2024, the library is offering a Scite AI subscription for all university students, faculty, and staff members. This tool allows for discovery of over 100M scholarly articles, citation tracking, article summarization, and reference checking. It features an AI Research Assistant with an AI chatbot interface to to make scholarly information more accessible. Because it's oriented to the world of scholarship, unlike general purpose AI chatbots, this tool can be a good resource for students that will allow them to find, evaluate, and use high-quality information, while taking advantage of the user-friendliness of a conversational interface. Our blog post details what the tool can do and provides links to scite tutorials.

Semantic Scholar
Semantic Scholar provides free, AI-driven search and discovery tools, and open resources for the global research community. Index of over 200 million academic papers sourced from publisher partnerships, data providers, and web crawls.
Consensus
Research tool: Yes / No questions with scholarly resources, synthesis of overall findings of scholars in reply to question. Citations for all resources included in synthesis are provided. Free to try.
Focus on questions that researchers may have studied. See example topics below ranging from biology to social sciences. Current source material used in Consensus comes from the Semantic Scholar database, which includes over 200M papers across all domains of science.
Scite AI
Discovering and evaluating scientific articles via Smart Citations. Smart Citations allow users to see how a publication has been cited by providing the context of the citation and a classification describing whether it provides supporting or contrasting evidence for the cited claim.
1.2b citation statements extracted and analyzed
185m articles, book chapters, preprints, and datasets
Scholarcy
Scholarcy is an AI-powered tool that helps users read, understand, and summarize scientific research papers. It uses machine learning to extract structured data and knowledge summaries from scholarly content. Use with reference manager like Zotero. Ask it to generate flashcards. Free trial. ($9.99/month)
Elicit AI Research Assistant
Elicit is an AI assistant for researchers and academics, particularly geared toward literature reviews / systematic reviews. Extract information from PDFs you upload, synthesize information and find concepts, related materials. (Incubated at Ought and now running as an independent public benefit corporation.) A review of the tool from Jrnl of Canadian Health Association (April 2023) is visible at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10089336/
Litmaps AI
Litmaps - find the articles and papers you need to complete a literature review. From a single paper, Litmaps generates a map of the most relevant articles that relate to your seed paper. Graphical map allows you to explore the articles, add new terms to expand your search and let Litmaps find the articles you didn’t know you needed to know about. Once you’re happy, save your new collection as a Litmap and share it.
Research Rabbit
Collect, get alerts, visualize scholarly papers on a topic. Mapping like Litmaps to see relationship between papers. They describe as "spotify" for scholarship.

See General purpose Generative AI tools & Search-related tools:

ChatGPT (OpenAI)
Generates creative synthesis of information based on massive large language model. Type text into chatbot and get results that sound like natural language answers. Have a conversation with those answers. Ask the tool to create new stories, to read articles & synthesize information, challenge your thesis, create flashcards, etc. OpenAI is the company behind this tool. ChatGPT3.5 is free to use (must register with an email address); more recent models may require Plus subscription ($20/month). Limitations: may be inaccurate - as with all AI based on LLM, prone to "hallucinations" so check any results provided, no matter how convincing they sound. Especially check citations. Only use if allowed by syllabus/assignment. Don't shortcut your learning with over-reliance. Plagiarism is a violation of CCSU's Academic Integrity Code. If allowed to use, cite the AI. Additional limitations: has a knowledge "cutoff" date - ask the AI, but double-check because it may not be accurate in what it tells you. See this article on how to check the true cutoff date https://ediscoverytoday.com/2024/06/27/knowledge-cutoff-and-chatgpt-how-to-determine-the-actual-cutoff-artificial-intelligence-best-practices/
Copilot (from Microsoft, formerly Bing chat)
Microsoft's version of the OpenAI large language model.
Gemini (Google)
Claude (Anthropic)
Perplexity (Perplexity AI)
A genAI-based search engine; includes real-time web-based information. It can be filtered to academic resources.
Poe (Quora)

More on Hallucinations

To see which Generative AI / LLM models are most accurate vs. prone to so-called hallucinations, check out this leaderboard!