Using AI-powered Tools for Literature Reviews

Scite is a tool which offers a quantitative and qualitative insight into how publications cite each other. It has 1.2 billion citation statements extracted and analysed from 181 million articles, book chapters, preprints and datasets. It accesses full text articles and uses a deep learning model to tell you

• How many times an item was cited by others.
• How it was cited by others by displaying the surrounding text within that paper.
• Whether each citation offers supporting or contrasting evidence, or simply mentions it.
• See an example publication.

Scite users can

• Search citation statements: discover and understand whether an article provides supporting or contrasting evidence without reading the full article. 
• Create your own dashboard: evaluate groups of articles in a single place and receive notifications when new supporting or contrasting citations are made.
• Visit Journals or Institutions' dashboards: compare rankings or find their publications.
• Visualise research: discover and evaluate how articles cite each other through interactive visualisations.

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Connected Papers is a visual tool to help researchers find and explore papers relevant to their field of work.

• It analyses approximately 50,000 papers from Semantic Scholar to create a graph, and then selects the most relevant papers.
• In the graph, papers are arranged according to their similarity. That means even papers that do not directly cite each other can be strongly connected and very closely positioned. 
• The similarity metric is based on the concepts of co-citations and bibliographic coupling. According to this measure, two papers that have highly overlapping citations and references are presumed to have a higher chance of addressing a similar subject.
• The algorithm then builds a Force Directed graph to distribute the papers in a way that visually clusters similar papers together and pushes less similar papers away from each other. Upon node selection it highlights the shortest path from each node to the original paper.

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Elicit is a free research tool using large language models to automate parts of researchers’ workflows. It is especially useful for empirical research like randomised controlled trials.  After entering a research question, Elicit will display relevant papers and summaries of key information about those papers in an easy-to-use table. The steps are

1. Search over 200 million papers from Semantic Scholar database using natural language. You can then select the 400 closest papers by saving titles and abstracts using paraphrase-mpnet-base-v2.
2. Re-rank those 400 papers using GPT-3 Babbage model, and further filter to the top 20 using castorini/monot5-base-msmarco-10k. Elicit then allows you to select the top 8 papers.
3. Find and parse PDFs of open access papers using Unpaywall and Grobid.
4. Summarise the top papers and provide short answers to your search question.
5. For each of the top papers, extract key information like outcomes measured, interventions and sample size, and display them in columns. Users can download a CSV or .bib file to import into reference managers like EndNote, Mendeley and Zotero.

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Inciteful has developed two tools to date

• Paper Discovery tool builds a network of papers from one seed paper. It uses network analysis algorithms to find similar papers, important papers, as well as prolific authors and institutions. 
• Literature Connector tool helps interdisciplinary scholars bridge two domains. It allows users to enter two papers and it will generate an interactive visualisation map showing you how they are connected by the literature.

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Iris is a comprehensive platform for literature reviews. It offers a Smart Search and a wide range of filters, reading list analysis, auto-generated summaries, autonomous extraction and formatting of data. Users with premium subscriptions have access to these functions

• Search: users can upload 10-20 representative documents relevant to their field of research, the platform then enlarges that set using Open Access literature to a dataset of approximately 2,000 documents. The platform also suggests search keywords based on a short description.
• Filter: Iris provides both context and data filtering which sorts articles based on text descriptions and data entities.
• Analyse. The platform can analyse a document set of up to 20,000 documents using both generic topics and specific topics. Users are able to explore both the most meaningful words of the document set, the least common words and related synonyms. 
• Extract: the Extract Tool fetches and links all the key data from PDFs into a tabular, machine readable, systematic format. This includes text, tables, graphs, figures and other types of layouts. 
• Summarise: the Workspace comes with a configurable summarisation engine. It can rapidly produce summaries of single or multiple abstracts, and single or multiple full text documents. 
• Monitor and Alert: for each search filtering, analysis, and extraction can be set up to monitor and send you alerts for new documents matching exact criteria.

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Litmaps generates an interactive map of relevant articles that relate to a seed paper. The most recent articles appear on the right hand side of the map, the most cited articles appear at the top and the lines show the citations in-between. Users can click on each dot and add more concepts to expand the map.

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