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Engineering Subject Guide — AI Tools for Research

This guide offers information for students and faculty, on and off campus, on locating library resources and services suited for the School of Engineering.

AI Tools for Academic Research and Writing

New tools are constantly emerging from LLMs (Large Language Models) that use generative AI to produce new analysis, text, or to answer questions.  Below I have listed some AI tools that are especially developed to aid with scholarly research.  Please note that listing these tools does not imply that I encourage or endorse them. Please be aware of the risks of uploading information to AI tools with regards to either:

  • sensitive or confidential information (DO NOT upload sensitive, confidential, or proprietary information to these tools)
  • copyright infringement (many publishers/journals/authors prohibit the uploading of articles or their writing to LLMs)
  • data ownership policies (read the fine print)
  • AI hallucinations. An AI hallucination is incorrect or misleading information generated by an AI model. AI tools can hallucinate references, resources, and links. They can make up references that look legitimate, but are false or do not exist.  Do not blindly trust references given by chat prompt LLM AI tools like Chat GPT.

That being said, we now live in the era of ubiquitous AI. Many of these tools developed specifically for researchers can be very useful.  Best practices with regards to using AI include acknowledgement of the use of an AI tool in your work, citation, and checking for errors,

Make sure you A.C.E. your use of these tools by:

  • Acknowledging that you used a LLM AI tool in your research or assignment
  • Citing the tool in your bibliography or list of Works Cited
  • Evaluating for errors: check for errors in references; is the information given by the AI tool true? Does it add value?

This list was created by and is maintained by STEM librarian Renée Walsh. Renée created the acronym A.C.E. as a pedagogical mnemonic device. It can be reused and remixed by attribution under a CC-BY Open Commons license.

Remember to Acknowledge, Cite, and Evaluate! A.C.E.

Are you interested in professional development about generative AI from UConn?  Please see the link below to UConn CETL workshops as well as a link to the UConn BEACON AI club.

AI Tools for Summarizing/Analyzing Research Paper Key Points

AI Tool for Analyzing Scientific Research Papers for Errors

AI Tools for Asking Questions and More!

AI Tool (Plug-In) for Math and Science calculations

Add a Wolfram topic as a plug-in to your Chat-GPT.  Here is a screen capture that shows the list of  plug-ins available by topic:

Search Scholarly Papers and Patents

AI Tool for Scientific Illustrations and Images

AI Tool for Mind Mapping

AI Tool Aggregator

AI Tools for Video Generation

New tools and apps for video generation are always emerging.  These are not necessarily for research purposes, but good to know about for information literacy purposes.  Here are some well known tools:

Computer Science Machine Learning Platforms

AI Tools for Network Analysis/identifying Similar Papers/Researchers

AI Tool for Generating Outlines, Structuring Writing, or Notetaking

Learn more about NotebookLM by listening to the podcast linked below!

AI Tools for Systematic Reviews

AI Tools for Computer Programming Code Review

AI Tools for Computational Data Analysis or Data Visualizations

Other AI Chat Tools:

Tools for Text to Speech Conversion

AI Standards information

AI standards are an emerging topic, which is changing rapidly all the time.

AI Tools for Image Generation

New AI tools and apps for image generation are always emerging.  These are not necessarily for research purposes, but good to know about for information literacy purposes.  Here are some well known tools:

Are you not sure how to tell if an image is real or AI?  Try the test at the link below:

Not sure where an image is from? Try reverse image searching:

Blockchain Apps for Education

Books on AI and University Academics

Want to learn more about AI tools and academic research?

The university library research guides listed below may also be useful to you: