Guides & Tutorials: Online Tools for Assignment: Research Data Tools

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Research Tools

In this section, we would like to introduce helpful tools for conducting a comprehensive search.

AI OneSearch Lite
An enhanced function that complements traditional OneSearch. It allows you to ask questions similar to how you interact with chatbots like ChatGPT, except that the answers are based on traceable sources from our Library, ensuring your academic work is grounded on trustworthy information.

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Users are required to login to access AI OneSearch Lite.
Scite
An AI-powered platform, with the two major features for discovering and evaluating scholarly articles. It retrieves information by searching through over 1.2 billion citation statements across 103,000 journals, ensuring more evidenced responses.
- Scite Assistant
- Citation Statement Search with Smart Citations
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The Library's subscription to Scite is available to all PolyU staff and students. To access premium features, please sign up for a scite account or log in to your existing one.
Consensus
An AI research tool with functions to speed up the process of finding, understanding and summarizing academic papers. It specializes in synthesizing scientific consensus on a topic, reflecting reflect the majority view or balanced perspectives on research questions.

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Free plan available with limited usage quota.
Elicit
An AI research tool that helps automating and streamlining the literature review processes by finding relevant academic papers, extracting and organizing key data, and summarizing evidence in structured tables.

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Free plan available with limited usage quota and features.
Semantic Scholar
A free AI-powered academic search engine for scientific literature, including over 200 million publications from diverse disciplines, with features that facilitate the researcher's understanding of the material.

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Several AI research tools are also using Semantic Scholar as a data source due to its comprehensive database and robust API, for example Elicit, Consensus and Connected Papers and Consensus and more.
Ai2 Paper Finder
A free AI-powered literature search system that mimics the multi-steps workflow of human researchers by breaking down queries, following citations, evaluating relevance and running follow-up queries based on results, to find academic papers more comprehensively. Also developed by Allen Institute for AI, Ai2 ScholarQA answers questions by synthesizing and summarizing relevant papers.
Undermind
An AI-powered research assistant that autonomously analyzes millions of academic papers with a multi-stage, human-like iterative search process to deliver precise insights.

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Free plan available with limited usage quota and features.
Yale MeSH Analyzer
It helps in designing effective search strategies by showing how articles are indexed in MEDLINE database in an easy-to-scan tabular format, aiding in the selection of appropriate MeSH terms.

Research Data Tools

Collecting, managing and analyzing data are necessary for many assignments. In this section, we would like to introduce helpful tools for data collection, cleaning, visualization, and analysis.

Data Collection
	Google Forms Here's a free tool for online surveys in the event you are using this method to collect responses and data for your assignment.
Data Cleaning
	OpenRefine A powerful tool for messy data cleaning and data transformation, which helps you to convert data format or data structure in order to facilitate further data analysis.
Data Visualization
	Tableau Public A free software that allows you to create interactive data visualization without programming knowledge.
	Scimago Graphica A free data visualization tool that provides an easy way to explore, communicate, and make sense of data without using any coding.
	The Data Visualisation Catalogue A handy guide and library of different data visualization techniques, tools, and resources to learn how to use different forms of data visualization.
	Flourish A user-friendly online tool to present your data with visualizations and stories.
Data Analysis
	Voyant Tools An open-source online tool allows you to "see through your text" by conducting different types of analysis on a body of text.
	Python A multipurpose language that has been widely used in data processing and analysis by data scientists.
	R A programming language that can help us to conduct statistical analysis and data visualization.

More online tools can be found from our Digital Scholarship guide.

Except where otherwise noted, the content of this guide is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.