This page looks at free generative AI tools that may be useful for literature searching.
These may be helpful to many parts of the search process, like keyword generation, organising information and seeing other perspectives. However, as always it is your responsibility to evaluate the sources of your information. Answers and references can be hallucinated or biased. You will need to use your research and critical thinking skills to check answers and references to sources.
Sometimes it can be difficult to see exactly where an AI tool has sourced information from, so check the information against published sources, for example using LibrarySearch. Currently searching in this way does not replace systematic, structured searching in scholarly databases as grounding for research.
This could be a long list! If you Google something, you may well receive an AI overview based on Google's Gemini large language model. Some popular options include:
| Information Sources | Data Protection | |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Copilot is an AI tool designed by Microsoft. There is a web version and a version built into Microsoft 365. | The free version of Copilot uses GPT-5, the OpenAI model which has been trained on data up to September 2024, but can also use information from the open internet via Bing. | If you are logged in with a University account, you will see a shield next to New Chat that tells you that Enterprise Data Protection applies to this chat - Warning you to use discretion when sharing personal and organisational data. |
| ChatGPT is a generative AI chatbot developed by OpenAI. | The free version of ChatGPT now uses GPT-5 (subject to usage limits and fallback to the mini variant when caps are reached). | You can turn off chat history in ChatGPT. See New ways to manage your data in ChatGPT. |
| Google Gemini is another generative AI chatbot developed by Google. | It runs from Google and harvests data in real time. | You can manage some of the activity that Google saves about your chats. See your Gemini Apps Activity. |
These tools are improving rapidly, with access to the live web and features like "Deep Research". However, they still sometimes provide hallucinated/incorrect references.
Many of the tools above would have been trained only on literature on the open internet. This may include titles and abstract of articles, but not full text of articles or books behind paywalls.
Some publishers and Library systems are currently working on their own integrations of AI tools, which would then have access to the information in that particular database. We will aim to keep an up to date list of what is available at Edinburgh Napier University below:
| ENU login | Information source | Data protection |
| Oxford Academic | The Oxford Academic platform hosts books from a range of leading university presses. How to use the tool. |
OUP privacy policy |
| Hein Online | HeinOnline is an online research platform that provides more than 200 million pages of multidisciplinary periodicals, essential government documents, international resources, case law, and more. -Provides AI summaries of articles |
HeinOnline’s privacy policy |
There are a number of AI tools specifically designed for academic literature searching.
Some of the many free tools out there which may be useful for literature searching include:
Consensus - Consensus is an AI academic search engine, with citations coming from Semantic Scholar. It uses the Consensus Meter (Beta) with colours to show you supporting or opposing evidence for claims. Free for limited uses.
Getting started with Consensus.
Connected Papers - Connected Papers helps you visually explore academic literature by building a graph of related papers based on a seed paper. Like Research Rabbit (below), it may help you understand the structure of a research field and discover new works.
Elicit - Elicit is an AI research assistant that helps you automate parts of the research workflow, such as finding relevant papers, extracting key information, and generating summaries.
Getting started with Elicit
NotebookLM - NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant developed by Google. It allows you to extract and summarise data from a variety of sources, including papers, websites and Youtube videos. Then you can develop a podcast overview of your sources to listen to and interact with.
Research Rabbit - Research Rabbit is a "citation based literature mapping tool". By adding one or more 'seed' papers to your account, the tool will find more papers for you based on the papers and topics you have added, making it a useful tool for literature searching and reviewing.
Getting started with Research Rabbit.
Rayyan - This is an AI powered tool for systematic reviews. This is most useful for researchers and not for students who may be carrying out a literature review in a systematic style. Rayyan allows users to organise, manage and collaborate on systematic reviews.
Scholarcy - Scholarcy is an AI summarising tool. It can read through books, research papers, journal articles PDF's and Word documents and break them down into bite sized sections (or 'flashcards'), to help you quickly assess the information within, such as themes, findings limitations and data.
Getting started with Scholarcy.
Undermind - Undermind is an AI research assistant that reads and analyses thousands of papers to answer complex research questions.
Comparison overviews of AI tools for academic literature searching:
AI Tools for Literature Search: An Overview
Tübingen University Library, updated June 2025.
An in depth list of different AI tools relevant to literature searching.
Monash Library AI Tool decision matrix
Monash Library has developed a decision matrix to help you choose the AI search tool that suits your needs. Librarians have graded the tools based on ease of use, functionality, and reliability of the sources.
The library at Edinburgh Napier offers support in the use of Endnote and Mendeley and runs training workshops in each. See our Training & Events Calendar for more information.