Artificial intelligence (AI) tools have an incredibly powerful role to play in supporting your PhD. As long as generative AI is used responsibly and transparently, and is not used as a replacement for your own brain, it’s a no-brainer to make the most of tools that help boost your research efficiency and productivity. The PhD Place is excited to have partnered with one such platform to tell you all about it!
What is SciSpace?
SciSpace is a unique AI-powered platform specialising in scholarly material, providing all-in-one AI assistance for PhD students. It promises to help you do “hours’ worth of research in minutes” – finding, understanding and referencing academic literature. The platform’s ultimate aim is to accelerate scientific discovery through streamlining all of the menial tasks that slow academics down.
The range of features on offer include SciSpace Literature Review, Copilot, AI Writer, Paraphraser and Citation Generator. Learn more about how these features can help you below!
Finding Academic Literature
Conducting a literature review can be a minefield, but SciSpace’s Lit Review tool helps make it a more streamlined and efficient process. Ask it, ‘What are recent studies on…?’ and SciSpace will produce both a summary and detailed insights synthesised from the top research articles related to your query. Crucially, it provides links to the sources for deeper exploration.
SciSpace draws from a vast database of 287 million+ scholarly articles from various domains and disciplines. You can filter your results by different criteria including publication year, journals and keywords to find the most pertinent information for your research.
You can also search for specific concepts using the Find Concepts tool, helping you explore complex ideas within and across scholarly articles. You’ll wish you’d added SciSpace to your lit review toolkit long ago!
Understanding Academic Literature
A huge part of a PhD is learning how to engage with others’ work. Comprehending academic literature is a muscle to be developed, but with the sheer amount of intensive reading that needs to be incorporated into a literature review, it can very quickly become overwhelming and time-consuming.
Here’s where Copilot can assist. Copilot is SciSpace’s AI chatbot that specifically aids your understanding and digestion of academic literature, helping you grasp complex papers faster. Simply upload the PDF and highlight the text that you’d like Copilot to summarise, which it cheekily begins with ‘TL;DR’, internet lingo for ‘too long; didn’t read’!
The real kicker is that as you read the article, you can ask Copilot follow-up questions to further strengthen your understanding of the literature. It responds to your questions in real-time, backed by references for your perusal.
Try inputting commands like, ‘Explain the practical implications of this paper’, ‘What are the limitations of this paper?’, ‘What are future works suggested in this paper?’ and ‘What other papers do you recommend in this area?’ For STEM researchers seeking layman explanations of complex equations, diagrams and tables, Copilot will break it all down for you in detail. What an awesome tool to help make complex work more accessible!
Drafting Academic Writing
Ever sit down and stare at a blank Word document without knowing where to even start, despite all the notes and ideas at your disposal? Writing can be a very daunting task, and time can be wasted getting yourself into a workflow. SciSpace’s groundbreaking AI Writer tool is designed to support your creativity and productivity by smoothing the writing process, like a dutiful assistant sitting next to you as you write, giving you a prod in the right direction.
AI Writer’s autocomplete function helps you overcome writer’s block by offering intelligent suggestions to complete your sentence or paragraph, enabling you to articulate your ideas fluidly and efficiently. Simply start typing in the document and suggestions will automatically appear for how you might continue. The more context you provide by writing more text, the better and more accurate the suggestions will be.
If you like the autocomplete suggestion, press the TAB key to accept it – a seamless integration without interrupting your flow! It’s like throwing writing ideas around with an assistant, only faster, and you decide what makes sense and what can be developed. You can also customise the output to align with your preferred writing style. Your blank page then transforms into a draft you can work with!
To make the writing process even more seamless, you can highlight any text and click ‘Cite’ from the toolbar, and AI Writer will provide intuitive citation suggestions for you to verify. Double win!
Improving Academic Writing
The Paraphraser AI tool is designed to help you elevate your academic writing skills, ensuring clear and high-quality prose without taking away the meaning. The interface is intuitive to use: simply input your text and customise your desired length and whether you want the output to have minor tweaks or major rewrites. The Premium plan allows you to choose from 22 preset tones, or customise the tone to sound like any personality you have in mind!
Paraphraser also has multilingual capability to rephrase text into 75 languages. Choose your preferred language, style your text and overcome language barriers – no biggie!
It goes without saying that if you input someone else’s work in Paraphraser and incorporate the output, you must cite the original author appropriately to avoid plagiarism.
Referencing Academic Literature
Working on a bibliography can be a gruelling necessary evil, but it’s never been simpler with the tools at our disposal.
SciSpace offers a Citation Generator, free-to-use and with no annoying ads. It allows you to choose from thousands of citation styles – you’d have to be pretty unlucky for your field or department’s citation style to not be supported! It produces both in-text and bibliographic citations for journal articles, books, book chapters, webpages and press releases in just a few clicks. Simply search for the literature title/paste the content/enter the source URL (lots of options there), and within seconds the Citation Generator will produce the citation according to your chosen style.
Final Thoughts
It’s well worth keeping an open mind to technological advancements in academia, the latest being generative AI and large language models. They are improving in quality every day, with SciSpace already offering immense value to your PhD journey as an on-hand 24/7 supportive assistant. Getting muddled over an article? Engage with it through Copilot. Dealing with writer’s block? Open AI Writer. Can’t articulate the right phrase? Use Paraphraser.
Remember to always check the output of AI models for factual accuracy. Generative AI can ‘hallucinate’ material, meaning it might sometimes ‘make up’ false information but present it confidently as a fact (not unlike some humans…!). SciSpace decreases the chance of hallucinations by grounding the output with citations, which you should always verify. While AI can never be a replacement for your own critical thinking skills and responsible research practice, utilising tools like SciSpace is a gamechanger to streamline your PhD experience.
SciSpace is highly accessible, offering both a free plan with limits on use and a Premium plan for a richer experience. Have a play with it and see what you think!
