Today there are 68 different AI research assistants. We spent 40 hours comparing the top 50 to find the seven best you can use to boost your research capabilities, with the help of AI.
What is the Best AI Research Assistant?
- Perplexity AI — best of the best
- Sourcely — best for academic work
- Elicit — best for scientific research
- Iris.ai — best for enterprises
- Research Rabbit — best for data visualization
- EndNote Click — best to eliminate paywalls
- Semantic Scholar — best free alternative
Our Verdict — Best Of The Best
Price: $20/month
Perplexity is a conversational search engine that lets you go deep into research, with any topic. We think it’s the best of the best because of how much time it saves, when compared to your regular internet searches.
The Best Part:
Time-bending powers. Perplexity will read and analyze multiple sources for you, and give you the abridged version of whatever you ask… without all that endless clicking you get on your search engine of choice.
The Worst Part:
Better for broad overviews. Perplexity does a great job at helping you understand topics, but it wont go as deep as specialized AI’s — so it might oversimplify topics that are too complex.
Get it if you want a time-saving tool for getting more out of your internet searches.
I recommend you get started with the free plan.
(free plan)
Best For
Perplexity AI is best for people who want to get quicker answers to their everyday questions.
Top Features
Conversational interface. Think of Perplexity as a “Google” that you can talk to — ask your questions, and it will answer you in natural language, rather than a list of links for you to click through.
Deep dive. Keep asking follow-up questions to go deeper, and explore topics from different angles.
Real time info. Perplexity is able to deliver up-to-date info, in real time, even in events as dynamic as sports scores, for example.
Source by source. Get links to every original source used in Perplexity responses, which makes fact checking super easy.
Clean interface. There’s nothing to learn in order to get started. If you can search on Google, you can use Perplexity.
Try Perplexity AI today with a free plan.
2. Sourcely
Our Verdict — Best For Academic Work
Price: Starts at $17/month
Sourcely is the most incredible assistant when you’re going deep into academic research. We think it’s the best for academics because of how easy it makes to uncover tons of relevant sources.
The Best Part:
Smart research. Give Sourcely a title or a subject, and it will unearth tons of relevant sources for your content, in seconds, with all the relevant sources you could ask for.
The Worst Part:
Capped free trial. Sourcely’s trial is only good for about 350 words, which is barely enough to even get started.
Get it if you want to spend way less time researching.
I recommend you get started with the trial plan, with 2000 credits for $7.
($7 trial plan)
Best For
Sourcely is best for students and researchers who want fast and accurate sources for their content.
Top Features
All the relevant sources. With its contextual algorithm, Sourcely will find all of the sources you need for your research papers, even those hardest ones.
Recent vs old. Looking to filter out outdated, old sources and focus on the freshest info? You got it!
Trusted sources. If you want to prioritize the most cited sources, it’s easy to do so. That will also make your paper more trustworthy!
Summaries DFY. If you’re tired of reading through thousands of pages, Sourcely creates rich summaries to help you find the articles with which you should focus more of your time.
Auto formats. Forget the pain that it is to get citations right. Let Sourcely format all of your citations in the right academic standards, with a single click.
Annual subscriptions provide a 20% discount.
Try Sourcely today with the trial plan.
3. Elicit
Our Verdict — Best For Scientific Research
Price: Starts at $12/month
Elicit enables you to automate the time-consuming tasks and gather much more data, with way less time and effort. We think it’s the best for scientific research because of how efficient it is.
The Best Part:
Life saving. Elicit will help you save a ton of time in your research, so you’re spending more time on the meat of your research.
The Worst Part:
Always double check. As with any AI, you should check the context and sources it finds, to make sure your data is 100% good.
Get it if you want to pretend to have a superhuman reading ability.
I recommend you get started with the free trial.
(free trial)
Best For
Elicit is best for researchers, students, writers, and anyone who needs to go through hard-to-read scientific papers.
Top Features
Google-like powers. Elicit will help you to identify and find all relevant papers, even when the keywords are not exact matches, like a librarian.
Concise summaries. You’ll get customized, to the point abstracts of your research so you can find all the key information, as quick as a hare.
High-accuracy mode. With that mode, you can extract data from other academic papers to populate your article with highly accurate info.
Complete review on a whim. Find tons of articles, and summarize them all, eight by eight. Research with a bang.
More tools. Elicit is more than just a research assistance. You get text classification, summarization of complex concepts, you can chat to PDF files, papers, or articles… and a lot more.
Annual subscriptions provide a 15% discount.
Try Elicit with a free plan.
Our Top Three Picks
Here’s a quick summary of our top three picks:
- Perplexity AI — best of the best
- Sourcely — best for academic work
- Elicit — best for scientific research
Here’s a quick comparison of our top seven picks:
Tool | Entry Offer | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
Perplexity AI | Free plan | $20/mo |
Sourcely | 7-day trial plan | Starts at $17/mo |
Elicit | Free trial | Starts at $12/mo |
Iris.ai | Free plan | Custom |
Research Rabbit | None | Free forever |
EndNote Click | Free plan | Starts at $125 |
Semantic Scholar | None | Free forever |
Here are the top 50 AI research assistant tools we considered in this review:
- Perplexity AI
- Sourcely
- Elicit
- Iris.ai
- Research Rabbit
- EndNote Click
- Semantic Scholar
- Scite.ai
- Connected Papers
- Dimensions.ai
- Zotero
- Mendeley
- ReadCube Papers
- Paperpile
- Colwiz
- CiteSeerX
- CORE
- BASE
- ArXiv
- bioRxiv
- ChemRxiv
- Explainpaper
- Julius AI
- CrossRef
- Scopus
- Web of Science
- ProQuest
- EBSCOhost
- AI2
- Scholarcy
- Litmaps
- Yewno Discover
- Inciteful.xyz
- Afforai
- Scinapse
- Researcher App
- AI Scholar
- F1000Workspace
- PubChase
- Kudos
- Trinka AI
- Writefull
- SciSpace
- CiteAI
- Sparrho
- Atypon
- Paperguide
- Overleaf
- RefSeek
- Digital Science
What do users love about AI research assistants?
- Saving hours of mindless scanning through hundreds of papers with instant auto-generated summaries
- Turning quick, messy notes into polished academic writing
- Having a personal research assistant always ready to find and analyze relevant articles
- Getting citation styles automatically applied across your entire document analysis
- Getting thousands of scholarly sources for relevant studies in an instant
- Having specialized language models that actually understand research questions and find actually relevant articles
- Streamlining the literature review process
- Academic researchers love how it handles reference management and bibliography formatting
- Accessing synthesized academic articles for more thorough comprehensive literature reviews
- Using AI-powered research tools to save time with citation analysis
- Executing quick literature reviews
The Bottom Line
To recap, here are the best AI research assistant software to try this year:
- Perplexity AI — best of the best
- Sourcely — best for academic work
- Elicit — best for scientific research
- Iris.ai — best for enterprises
- Research Rabbit — best for data visualization
- EndNote Click — best to eliminate paywalls
- Semantic Scholar — best free alternative
