AI tools in scientific writing

It can be difficult to keep track of all AI-powered tools that emerge and the developments happen extremely fast-paced. The field of scientific writing is no exception to this. Below, you can find a selection of tools that can be useful for different stages of the scientific writing process in the form of a living document. They are not a recommendation by us but rather a list of popular ones on the market. If one is missing that you really like, we're curious to learn about it - just get in touch!

The following are examples of available AI tools that can be helpful in the scientific writing process. They are listed alphabetically and not necessarily recommendations. The changes and further developments in this area are fast paced – and a tool that was good can be surpassed by another with one major update. Choose the ones that work best for you and fit your needs. Be diligent, make your own research and judgment, and use them ethically without compromising your academic integrity.

If you want to browse through existing tools or search for specific needs, the repository of AI apps theresanaiforthat.com can be a useful starting point.

    • Connected Papers: A visual AI tool to help with literature search and explore and discover related papers. It uses Semantic Scholar as a data source and is available as a free and paid version.
    • Consensus: An AI-based academic search engine that extracts and synthesises findings from peer-reviewed papers (Semantic Scholar). It provides quick answers to research questions to help understand consensus or different opinions on a topic.
    • Elicit: AI AI-based academic search engine designed to enhance the literature review process with customisable queries. It finds relevant papers, extracts relevant qualitative and quantitative data, and synthesises relevant information. Furthermore, it searches for papers relevant to the research question and provides a summary of the top four papers.
    • Perplexity AI: An AI-based search engine with a chatbot function that answers queries in natural language predictive text.
    • ResearchRabbit: An AI-based search engine for academic papers that creates maps of related and relevant literature based on citations. Coined "Spotify for papers", it allows you to discover and visualise authors and literature, build collections, share with colleagues, and integrate with Zotero.
    • scite.ai: AI tool offering insight into citations of scientific publications, their context, and position regarding a specific scientific claim. The tool states if articles mention, support, or contrast claims and distinguishes where a citation is made in the article structure.
    • Scopus AI: A search tool powered by generative AI based on the Scopus database. It summarises abstracts with citations to help understand and navigate unfamiliar academic content.
    • Semantic Scholar: An AI-powered scientific research and discovery tool that adds semantic analysis.

    • Loop: Microsoft's collaborative workspace built on the Office suite. If allowed for taking and organising notes, project planning, task management, etc.
    • Notion: All-in-one workspace with integrated AI tools that can be used for private or collaborative work. It can be used for taking notes, summarising texts, generating drafts, tracking applications, creating to-do lists, managing tasks, organising projects, etc. The tool is cloud based.
    • Obsidian: A note-taking app that helps with knowledge visualisation and connection through bidirectional thinking. All notes are in a markdown format and can be searched, categorised, and explored regarding their connections and links in an open graph view. It stores files locally, and not in the cloud. Unlike Notion, it does not include project management features.
    • SciteAssistant: An "AI research partner" by scite.ai which offers insight into citations of scientific publications, their context, and position regarding a specific scientific claim. It answers prompts based on references; both the included sources and the output can be specified.

    • ChatPDF: An AI-powered tool based on GPT-4 Turbo to chat documents and create new content from it. If you have a subscription, ChatGPT also has a ChatPDF GPT.
    • Humata: AI tool to chat with documents that you upload. The tool reads every file that you upload and is able to generate answers based on the contents, for example, summarising it or finding specific information and highlighting where in the documents it received the information from.

    • ChatGPT
    • Claude
    • Grammarly: An AI –powered writing assistant that can help with checking language and grammar, summarising, generative AI writing, brainstorming, paraphrasing, etc. in different text types.
    • Hemingway Editor: A writing tool that helps improve writing in terms of clarity and readability.
    • Paperpal: An AI tool specialised in academic writing. It has a range of features such as a language and grammar checker, paraphraser, plagiarism checker, generative AI, and AI-powered reference finder.
    • Poe: An AI chat that accesses various generative AI tools (ChatGPT, GPT-4o, Claude 3 Opus, Dalle 3, etc.).
    • Quillbot: An AI-powered writing assistant with various features such as paraphrasing, summarising, plagiarism, and language checks.
    • Trinka: An AI-powered writing assistant, grammar, and language checker for academic and technical writing.
    • Writefull: An AI-powered tool for academic writing that provides feedback on grammar, style, and usage of academic language. It considers context-specific usage, rather than rule-based grammar.

    • DeepL: An AI-powered translation tool for various languages.

    • Rev.ai: Speech-to-text transcription in various languages.

    • chattr: Interaction with Github Copilot and ChatGPT models directly in R Studio as help for coding.