The tools listed on this page are all either free or have a "freemium" model that includes some permanent free tier. Other paid-only tools and free trial tools without meaningful free access exist but are not listed here.
Any of the popular standalone chatbots can be a good tool for brainstorming keywords to search for a research topic. Many of the literature search tools below also show conceptual keywords that can help with developing search terms.
The following tools aim to help you find research on a topic. Many are not transparent about the sources of scholarship they search. They all have AI- or machine learning-based features, either on the backend (e.g. semantic search), or in user interfaces (e.g. text summarization).
Important note: The sources of the scholarly literature these tools search are not as comprehensive as those being searched by Google Scholar. Many of the tools are searching Semantic Scholar, a free and open semantic search engine with over 200 million academic papers sourced from publisher partnerships, data providers, and web crawling. In other tools, the body of literature being searched may be much more restricted. Check the tool's help documentation for information about its literature sources. Makers of these tools do not always transparently document what bodies of literature they search.
Standalone, free chatbots excel at generating code, and walking users through how to code a program to accomplish a task. This can be useful for working with data. Try using a free chatbot, like ChatGPT, to generate code for retrieving, analyzing, or visualizing data. Then paste it into your preferred development environment. such as free or freemium computational notebook platforms such as:
Machine learning-based tools for automatic coding are not new in qualitative data analysis software, but some existing platforms and newer apps are introducing more generative AI features. For example, these that either have a free tier or are available to some Temple users:
