AI-empowered research is reshaping the way we summarize, interpret, and discover knowledge. You and your students can now look to AI to potentially accelerate literature reviews and identify new hypotheses (Bolaños, Salatino, Osborne, & Motta, 2024). Decades ago, scholars visited their university library, with its grand bookshelves of knowledge and calming space filled with comfortable chairs to read for hours. But just as the physical library lost ground to the internet, scholarly discovery in the digital landscape is now accelerating in new ways with AI. 

Today, we enjoy the speed of accessing journals from our laptops and continue to rely on the same trusted knowledge assistants who save us time and uncover gems we would otherwise miss: our librarians.

Even as librarians remain familiar guides, a new assistant, AI, is ready to join the research team. You can guide students to use AI to suggest relevant papers, generate summaries, visualize their data, and even assist in interpreting results. Students are experimenting with AI but rely on their professors to cover proper utilization of it. Nearly 70% of students feel that understanding AI is important for workplace success in the future but only 19% say their university is regularly teaching them how to use it (Risepoint, 2025).

Getting started

Curious about how to begin using AI in scholarly work? Start by:

1. checking your institution’s guidance, 
2. contacting your librarian to learn which AI tools are built for researchers, 
3. exploring their features and capabilities by using the tools yourself,
4. and encouraging learners to explore AI-tools with an ethical mindset and “trust but verify” approach.

Your librarians might be able to provide an approved list of tools for scholarly work. AI-powered research tools have unique capabilities but often run with the same underlying tech from the AI apps you are familiar with (i.e., ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude). Your library staff has likely vetted the most popular research tools, like Elicit and ResearchRabbit, and can provide advice on how to get the most out of them. 

Once you know which AI tools to use for your research, explore their features and identify the use cases that will apply to your work. As you gain experience, it will help inform the guidance you will develop for your students to properly use them as well. It’s also important to keep in mind ways you may want to consider revising your assessments to challenge learners to exercise uniquely human capabilities (Risepoint, 2025).

Current capabilities of AI in research

AI-powered research tools are quickly replacing the keyword search techniques of the past (e.g., using quotes around a phrase, Boolean operators) with automated discovery of ‘similar papers’ and providing you with visualizations of the networks of articles available. 

For example, an AI research tool like ResearchRabbit can accelerate exploration of scholarly articles by reducing the time it takes for you to locate and draw connections between similar works. What used to be a slow, fragmented process is now dramatically faster, which naturally allows the researcher to build a collection of scholarly literature to support (or challenge) a hypothesis more efficiently than ever. 

Capabilities between tools vary, but the process of initially reviewing available research has become much faster. Clearly identifying gaps between research is a feature that seems to be still in progress but getting better quickly as well.

Here are two popular AI research tools:

• Elicit: search, summarize, extract data from, and chat with 138 million papers
• ResearchRabbit: search, interactive maps, recommendations, author tracking, and collaboration

Helping students navigate AI in academic research

As part of your institution’s guidance, a set of resources for learners might be available. If not, you often end up the main source of information about AI for research. 

This can be challenging because even if you have already have a defined “AI stance” for class assignments, conversations about AI for research asks us for an even deeper level of engagement around topics such as ethics, citation, plagiarism, disclosing use of AI in writing research, and publisher restrictions on AI-generated scholarly work. 

Again, if you’re provided with an approved list of tools from your school, that should be your go-to resource, but remember even with a list of AI tools for research, students need guidance on all the topics previously mentioned. When addressing learners, purposefully scaffold their experience for when they begin using AI in research.

Consider discussing each of the following with students before they get started:

Interested in guiding your students on how they can use AI to help with research? Check out the templates in our AI prompts for research.