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AI Research Assistants

Tools that search, read and synthesise literature and the web with citations. Best used to accelerate discovery, then verified against the primary sources they surface.

Picking a research assistant

Research assistants help you find, read and cite sources rather than chat freely. They fall into two groups, and the right one depends on whether you need the open web or peer reviewed papers.

  • Web answer engines such as Perplexity search the web and answer with numbered citations, and many frontier assistants now offer a Deep Research mode that runs many searches and writes a report. Google's AI Pro plan includes Deep Research, per Google's AI plans page.
  • Academic tools such as Elicit, Consensus, Semantic Scholar, scite, Connected Papers and ResearchRabbit search scholarly databases. Semantic Scholar comes from the Allen Institute for AI and is free, and scite shows whether later papers support or contrast a claim.
  • Source grounded notebooks such as Gemini Notebook answer only from documents you upload, which reduces made up citations.

Whatever you use, open the cited source before you rely on it. Answer engines can quote a real page but misread it, and academic tools can miss very recent preprints. For policy and frontier AI topics, go to the primary document, such as a White House order, a Federal Register entry or a lab's system card.

Compare the main options in Perplexity vs Claude and ChatGPT vs Perplexity. Our how we test page explains how we check sources in our own guides.

STORMstorm.genie.stanford.eduStanford research system that writes Wikipedia style articles from scratch by simulating multiperspective research conversations.Research AssistantsOpen source★ 31.7kGPT Researchergptr.devOpen source deep-research agent that plans queries, browses many sources and compiles a cited report.Research AssistantsOpen source★ 30.3kConnected Papersconnectedpapers.comVisual tool that builds a graph of related papers around any seed paper so you can explore a research field quickly.Research AssistantsFreemiumConsensusconsensus.appAcademic search engine that answers questions using peer reviewed research and shows how much the evidence agrees.Research AssistantsFreemiumElicitelicit.comResearch assistant that finds academic papers, summarises findings and extracts data into tables for systematic reviews.Research AssistantsFreemiumGemini Notebook (NotebookLM)notebook.googleGoogle's source grounded research notebook, formerly NotebookLM: upload documents and get cited answers, study guides and podcast style audio overviews.Research AssistantsFreemiumPerplexityperplexity.aiAnswer engine that searches the web and responds with cited sources, plus deep-research reports and follow up threads.Research AssistantsFreemiumResearchRabbitresearchrabbit.aiLiterature discovery app that recommends related papers and authors as you build collections.Research AssistantsFreemiumSemantic Scholarsemanticscholar.orgFree scholarly search engine from the Allen Institute for AI with AI generated paper summaries and citation graphs.Research AssistantsFreeUndermindundermind.aiDeep scientific search agent that reads through large volumes of papers to find the ones that truly match a complex question.Research AssistantsFreemiumscitescite.aiShows whether later research supports or contrasts a paper's claims using classified citation statements.Research AssistantsPaid

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