Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Health Sciences

The list below describes popular tools that can be integrated into projects, research or productivity workflows. These tools can help with basic information discovery through topic and citation exploration, exploring various topics, grammar and editorial assistance, creating code, etc.

Please note this list does not reflect library subscriptions. These resources are not intended for comprehensive or exhaustive searches. For more comprehensive projects such as systematic reviews, please refer to HSLIC's Systematic Reviews Research Guide.

• Elicit automates research tasks like summarizing papers, extracting data, and synthesizing your findings. Elicit claims to work best with empirical domains.

Cost: Free with an account. Plus accounts for a fee are also available.

Limitations: Summaries may misinterpret paper content; important for user to verify.

• ExplainPaper uses AI to simplify and explain research papers, helping readers quickly understand complex topics. Upload a paper, highlight confusing text, get an explanation. Powered by OpenAI.

  Cost: Free with an account. Plus and Pro accounts for a fee are also available.

  Limitations: User must upload PDF. Tool cannot search literature. Summaries may misintepret paper content; important for user to verify.

• ResearchRabbit is an AI-powered scholarly publication discovery tool. It offers visual maps and publication lists to guide users through interconnected research trails—akin to deep "rabbit holes"—from an initial article to related authors and works.

  Cost: Free with an account.

  Limitations: Search methods not transparent. Requires a time investment upfront to learn how to use the tool to its full potential.

• Semantic Scholar is an AI powered research tool for scientific literature. Data collected from 50+ academic publishers and a web crawler. Features Paper Question Answering AI tool to summarize papers.

  Cost: Free with an account.

  Limitations: Search methods not transparent. Summaries may misinterpret paper content; important for user to verify.

• ChatGPT is an AI tool that interacts in a conversational way. ChatGPT can brainstorm topics, provide feedback, generate content, translate to multiple languages, create code, etc. Users are encouraged to provide feedback as part of its reinforcement learning model.  Powered by OpenAI.

  Cost: Free with an account. Plus accounts for a fee are also available.

  Limitations: Cannot search web and/or current library literature. May produce inaccurate information; important for user to verify.

• Grammarly uses AI to assist during the writing process including brainstorming ideas, feedback, copy-editing, formatting citations, etc.

Cost: Free with an account.  Premium accounts for a fee are available.

Limitations: Limited prompts and features for the free account.

• Perplexity AI is a web search engine and chatbot that uses advanced AI technologies to provide accurate and comprehensive answers to user queries. It is designed to search the web in real-time and offer up-to-date information on various topics. Powered by OpenAI.

  Cost: Free. Upgrade to Claude-2 or GPT-4 access requires a subscription.

  Limitations: While Perplexity cites its sources, most are non-scholarly.  

The concept of AI literacy extends beyond just understanding the technology, and includes:

Skills & Competencies: The ability to use AI tools and applications effectively and responsibly.

Critical Perspective: Includes evaluating AI technologies, understanding their context, and scrutinizing their design and implementation.

Balanced View: Being able to recognize both the advantages and challenges of AI.

Informed Decisions: Ensuring choices about AI use are well-informed and deliberate.