How to Search for Sources and Manage Them

Inciteful graph

The Open Citations movement has facilitated access to bibliographic metadata. Combined with the advances in artificial intelligence, it has enabled the creation of new search tools.

Literature mapping tools help researchers find articles by exploring connections between publications. Most use one or more 'seed papers' as a starting point. They often use citations (articles citing or cited in the seed papers), or articles that appear in the bibliographies of several papers), algorithms and artificial intelligence. The results are displayed as a map, with the closest articles grouped together.

	Freemium Uses co-citation and bibliographic coupling to find articles that have highly overlapping citations and references 5 graphs per month with a free account
	Free No account creation required. Builds a citation network graph from one or several seed paper(s), or shows the connections between two papers There is a Zotero plugin allowing to create graphs directly from an item of your Zotero library
	Freemium Enter the DOI or title of an article, and find articles linked to it through citations
	Open source and free No cookies, no user-tracking Allows to build a citation network, starting from a source article
	Non-profit and open source Ask a research question and the results will be presented on a map with the 100 most relevant documents grouped by sub-topics
	Free (users can make donations) Does not sell users' data to third parties Rather sophisticated, it encourages jumping from paper to paper without getting lost in the rabbit hole You can create collections of papers inside Research Rabbit and synchronise them with your Zotero library; you can also import a Zotero collection into Research Rabbit for further exploration Allows to explore the network of researchers, to understand who publishes with whom

Chat GPT is not a search engine! It "hallucinates" (gives false answers that seem credible, especially if you are unfamiliar with the subject) and even makes up bibliographic references.

You can try these other tools (some are powered by GPT).

	Freemium; account creation required Illimited searches with a free account Enter a search question Generates a synthesis from the papers, and also provides a "consensus-meter" (proportion of papers answering yes or no to the search question). Free account users can only generate 3 syntheses and consensus-meters per month Zotero integration
	Freemium; account creation required Enter a search question Gives a one-sentence abstract summaries, extracts details from papers into an organised table Zotero integration
	Freemium; based in an EU country (Norway) Starts with a PDF file; Keenious analyses it to find relevant papers Integrated with Google docs and Microsoft Word; you can use your own drafts to search for new papers
	Free and AI-powered Looks like Google Scholar, gives normally less but more relevant results Explores the citation graph both ways (citing and cited papers), whereas Google Scholar goes only one way (citing papers). Distinguishes between "highly influential citations" and "background citations" A project at the Allen Institute for AI, a non-profit research institute created by Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder
	Freemium, you need to create an account Enter a search question with keywords Helps readers to understand articles more easily; provides a synthesis of top 5 articles You can ask follow-up questions to the "copilot", and even ask it to explain tables or figures You can also upload a PDF and ask Scispace to explain the content of the text There is a Chrome add-on
	Paid Uses Chat GPT for text generation Enter a natural language question Generates a summary with citation; hovering over the citation allows you to see the part of the text that generated the passage