AI-powered Research Workflow
With the exponential growth of publications across disciplines, GenAI are now transforming the workflow of researchers. For example, it can generate concise summaries, highlighting key findings, methodologies, and conclusions within seconds, allowing quickly assess to a related paper. Thus, How to use these tools might be the first quanlifying exam for Ph.D students in the near future.
In this post, I share some AI-powered research tools that I used and enjoyed.
Early stage
Connected papers - visual graph for related papers
1️⃣ Search for a Seed Paper – Enter a paper title, DOI, or ArXiv ID to generate a graph of related papers.
2️⃣ Explore the Graph – Identify central papers (foundational work) and peripheral papers (emerging trends).
3️⃣ Find Prior & Derivative Work – Track how research evolved over time.
4️⃣ Use Smart Filters – Sort by citation count, year, or connectivity to refine your literature search.
5️⃣ Export & Organize References – Download BibTeX, integrate with Zotero/Mendeley, and combine with Google Scholar/Semantic Scholar.
📌 Best Use Cases:
✅ Literature review – Quickly map a research field.
✅ Staying updated – Discover new high-impact and emerging works.
✅ Proposal writing – Justify research novelty with prior work.
Semantic Scholar - visual graph for related papers
1️⃣ Search & Discover – Find relevant papers using AI-powered search with filters for citations, year, and topic.
2️⃣ Read AI Summaries – Quickly grasp key insights with TL;DR paper summaries.
3️⃣ Explore Citation Networks – Track influential papers, co-citations, and related works to deepen your review.
4️⃣ Set Alerts – Stay updated on new research and trending papers in your field.
5️⃣ Save & Organize – Use collections to bookmark and categorize papers for structured reading.
📌 Best For: Literature review, tracking citations, and discovering emerging research trends.
Similar tools:
Research Rabbit - provide personalized digests;
Litmaps;
Consensus - if your research topic is controversial.
Formalizing your ideas
NotebookLM - pdf to podcasts
1️⃣ Upload Research Materials – Import PDFs, Google Docs, or text files for AI-assisted analysis. 2️⃣ Summarize Key Insights – Generate AI-powered summaries to quickly grasp essential points. 3️⃣ Ask Contextual Questions – Interact with the AI to clarify concepts and extract relevant information. 4️⃣ Organize & Link Notes – Connect ideas across multiple documents for structured research. 5️⃣ Enhance Literature Review – Streamline information synthesis for papers, proposals, and reports.
📌 Best For: Literature review, summarizing academic papers, and organizing research insights.
MinerU - pdf to word
1️⃣ Search & Discover – Enter keywords, topics, or papers to find relevant academic literature.
2️⃣ Extract Insights – Use AI-powered summarization to quickly grasp key ideas from papers.
3️⃣ Track Trends – Identify emerging research areas and monitor topic evolution.
4️⃣ Organize & Manage – Save, categorize, and annotate papers for structured literature review.
5️⃣ Generate Reports – Export summaries, citations, and references for papers, proposals, and reviews.
📌 Best Use Cases:
✅ Literature review – Quickly gather key papers & insights.
✅ Trend analysis – Stay updated on evolving research topics.
✅ Paper writing – Extract structured summaries for references.
Similar tools: SciSpace - PDF to video
ResearchFlow - visual mind mapping
1️⃣ Pose Research Questions – Input your queries to generate interactive visual mind maps that connect related papers, ideas, and citations, providing a comprehensive overview of your topic.
2️⃣ Explore and Expand – Interact with the mind maps by expanding nodes to delve deeper into subtopics, uncovering insights and connections that facilitate a thorough understanding of complex subjects.
3️⃣ Analyze Visual Data – interpret charts and graphs, simplifying complex data into understandable summaries.
4️⃣ Organize Findings – organize by adding notes and maintaining connections between various pieces of information, ensuring easy access and reference throughout your project.
📌 Best Use Cases:
✅ Literature review – Quickly generate a line of story.
✅ Inovative question – Asking for the interpretation and insights.
✅ Paper writing – Extract structured summaries for references.