Ian Mulvany

September 14, 2025

AI research tools - lot's of them, are they being used?

My wife is an academic, her university had a course on about use of GenAI, here are some of the tools that were used on the course:


The founder of https://www.world-brain-scholar.eu/ reached out to me to let me know about their tool, which includes the researcher assistant https://elicit.com/.

https://allref.io remains a favourite of mine, and https://www.futurehouse.org/ looks powerful.

The mother of all tools list is being curated by Helen King - https://coda.io/@helen-king/ai-powered-publishing-use-cases 

What this tells us is that there is a lot of innovation happening, which is unsurprising. What we can't see yet is how much traction any of these tools are getting. 

I don't hear a huge amount of buzz beyond the main LLMs, but then I'm not close enough to actual researchers. Does anyone have any insight into what the cool kids are using these days? 


About Ian Mulvany

Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!