AI Research Tools
Research used to mean hours in Google Scholar, reading dozens of abstracts, and manually tracking citations in a spreadsheet. AI research tools compress that workflow dramatically — but the key is choosing the right tool for your type of research.
Academic research : Elicit, Consensus, and Semantic Scholar search peer-reviewed databases and extract structured findings. Elicit stands out for letting you ask a research question and getting a table of relevant papers with methods, results, and sample sizes pulled automatically. Consensus focuses on finding scientific consensus across studies.
General knowledge research : Perplexity AI and Google's AI Overviews answer questions with inline citations from the web. Useful for market research, competitive analysis, and exploring topics you're not deeply familiar with. The quality varies — always check the sources.
Document analysis : Upload a PDF (or a stack of them) and ask questions. NotebookLM, ChatPDF, and Claude's document analysis are the main options. Best for digesting contracts, reports, and whitepapers faster than reading them cover to cover.
The citation problem
General-purpose LLMs still hallucinate references. If accuracy matters — and in research it always does — use tools that search real databases rather than generating answers from training data. A made-up citation is worse than no citation.
Browse the AI research tools below.