by Dr Viviana Greco, PhD in Neuroscience at Cardiff University
Conducting scientific research is like navigating a vast, uncharted galaxy filled with complex and sometimes daunting challenges, all the while managing an often immense workload. To this end, artificial intelligence (AI) tools have become invaluable allies to guide you through the intricate maze of academic projects. Whether you’re conducting experiments in the lab, writing scientific articles, publishing in journals, or working on your thesis, these tools will greatly enhance your efficiency and productivity. In this blog, I wanted to outline some of my favourite tools to hopefully help academics at any stage of their career optimise their time and lessen the burden of their most tedious tasks.
Literature Review with Scite and Research Rabbit
Writing literature reviews or managing citations, in general, has to be one of the most time-consuming tasks for anyone conducting any form of research. For this type of work, Scite stands out as a potent AI helper for deep analysis of the scientific literature, empowering researchers to make well-informed decisions about which studies to read and discuss when drafting a paper. Scite not only discovers references but is also able to discern whether those references are supporting, contradicting or providing critical insights to your arguments. Scite can also automatically extract key information from papers, such as research questions, methods, results, and conclusions.
Complementing Scite, there is Research Rabbit, which serves as an indispensable tool for uncovering relevant papers, tracking citations, and exploring the interconnectedness of various research areas. Research Rabbit’s strength lies in its ability to reveal the broader landscape of research related to your topic – and is certainly worth checking out.
Paper Writing Assistance with Trinka and Grammarly
Every researcher needs to write clear and well-structure texts to communicate their ideas to specialist and non-specialist audiences. This is where our next tool comes in: Trinka is specifically tailored for academic and technical writing. It conducts thorough grammar checks and provides nuanced assistance with tone, style, and complex language structures. This makes Trinka effective for various forms of academic documents, including research papers and theses. A similarly popular tool is Grammarly, renowned for its real-time feedback capabilities: it provides instant suggestions, corrections and plagiarism detection for text you write both online and offline.
Research Presentations with Canva and Beautiful.ai
Less often considered, but equally important for researchers are visual tools aimed and disseminating concepts and findings inside and outside academia. Here, I can recommend Canva and Beautiful.ai.
With a vast library of templates, images, and graphics, Canva enables researchers to create presentations that are not only informative but also aesthetically appealing. The platform's flexibility is a key feature, allowing for customisation of colours, fonts, and layouts to align with the specific theme or branding. Another option is Beautiful.ai, which offers a unique approach to presentation design through its AI-driven assistance. By automatically adjusting and aligning content, Beautiful.ai ensures that each slide looks professionally designed with minimal effort, creating dynamic, clean, and consistent presentations, which convey research findings with clarity and impact.
Task Management with Notion
Last but not least is time management: an often cited challenge for busy academics. Notion is a comprehensive workspace that integrates notes, databases, wikis, and project management features into a single platform. Notion's customisable templates cater to a variety of needs, whether it's for tracking daily tasks, organising research materials, or planning long-term projects.
