AI tools for academic literature research can be divided into "Finders" and "Connectors".
Here you will find a detailed list of the most important Finders and Connectors.
"Finders" work in a similar way to library catalogues: you enter a keyword, a phrase or - even better with many tools - a complete question. The tool then shows you a list of results.
"Connectors" are based on a publication that you have already found. You enter part of this publication’s metadata (preferably the DOI) into the tool in order to find related literature.
You can find more information on the tools mentioned here, in our training courses and consultations as well as in our self-study course. You can find many more AI tools for academic work here.
At the moment, the "Finders" are mainly suitable for research in the natural sciences and medicine, less so for the humanities and social sciences. These tools mostly find journal articles (i.e. not monographs) in English - especially if they have a DOI and have been published Open Access. If these criteria usually apply to the literature in your subject area, the "Finders" should be able to provide you with rather good results.
For the humanities and social sciences, we recommend trying out the "Connectors".
In addition, a brief note on the use of chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude etc. for academic literature research:
Since around the beginning of 2025, these tools have improved quite a bit with live access to the web and features like “Deep Research” for literature search. However, they still sometimes provide hallucinated or incorrect literature references. Also, the generated responses usually only cite very few publications.
Thus, “all-purpose AI chatbots” do not yet offer any added value for academic literature search.
