Research Guides: AI Tools for Research: Home

Overview

Temple Libraries is here to support your use of AI-powered features and tools in research and finding information.

We encourage you to test out the many tools available. Our AI Tools Report Card assessment rubric suggests questions to ask when you are evaluating AI-powered research tools.

The tools recommended on this guide are either free to Temple users or have some significant free usage tier. Other paid-only tools, and free trial tools without meaningful free access, exist but are not listed here.

ITHAKA S+R Generative AI Product Tracker
From the non-profit higher ed think tank ITHAKA S+R, this Generative AI Product Tracker lists generative AI products that are either marketed specifically towards higher ed faculty or students or are actively used by them for teaching, learning, or research. This list is a living document that is updated regularly. See this issue brief for more details.

Best bets with a free access tier

Perplexity
An "answer engine" that includes web search and has an interface similar to popular, standalone chatbots. Perplexity has free access to scholarly research plug-ins. Set Focus=Academic to search Semantic Scholar and PubMed. Set Focus=Wolfram Alpha for data discovery, visualization, and mathematical calculation. Accepts file uploads. See the Perplexity FAQ for help documentation.
Research Rabbit
Always free, non-profit citation chasing literature mapping and visualization tool. Searches a very large literature corpus covering >90% of academic databases, plus grey literature. Start with uploaded citations, or link to Zotero citation manager. Clear FAQ and help documentation.
Undermind.ai
A "deep search" tool with a substantial free tier. Takes a verbose user prompt and searches over titles and abstracts in Semantic Scholar. Runs multiple searches and learns from the results, yielding more comprehensive and accurate literature than many other tools. The company's own benchmarking claims to find it better than Google Scholar. Details in their whitepaper.

Temple AI course policy

Students: Temple policy prohibits the use of generative AI tools in a class, unless the instructor explicitly grants permission. Temple’s Student Code of Conduct defines unauthorized use of generative AI as academic misconduct (see section C.1.B.5. of the Student Code of Conduct). Different instructors may have different rules related to the use of generative AI. Students should read their syllabi carefully to learn what is permitted in a class.

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