Claude
Anthropic
AI assistant known for long documents, careful writing and coding help.
- Analysis of long PDFs and documents
- Projects for organising files and instructions
- Artifacts for documents, code and interactive pages
Best AI Research tools
AI research tools search the web or academic literature, summarise sources and show citations so you can check the original. Always open the cited source: AI summaries can misstate what a paper or page actually says.
5 tools in this category, listed alphabetically. Inclusion is editorial and not paid unless marked “Sponsored”.
Elicit
Elicit
AI research assistant for academic papers.
- Semantic search over academic papers
- Paper summaries
- Data extraction into tables
Google Gemini
Google's AI assistant, connected to Search, Gmail, Docs and Android.
- Chat with text, voice and images
- Integration with Gmail, Docs, Drive and other Google apps
- Deep Research reports
NotebookLM
AI research notebook grounded in the sources you upload.
- Answers grounded in your sources
- Citations to exact passages
- Audio Overviews
Perplexity
Perplexity AI
AI answer engine that shows its sources.
- Answers with inline citations
- Follow-up questions in context
- Source focus options
Guides for ai research
How to Use AI for Research: Find, Read and Verify Sources
A research workflow using AI search, academic tools and source-grounded notebooks — with a verification checklist.
2 min read
How to Spot and Avoid AI Hallucinations
Why AI tools state false things confidently, the warning signs, and a five-minute fact-checking routine.
2 min read
Perplexity vs ChatGPT for Research
Which is better for finding information: an AI answer engine or a general assistant with search?
1 min read