The 6 Best AI Tools for Postgraduate Research in 2025
Does studying for a postgraduate degree feel like a never-ending juggling act? You are buried in research, scrambling to meet deadlines and struggling to manage your time. On top of that, you might be working part-time just to stay afloat, while drowning in academic papers you barely have time to read.
Trust me, you are not alone.
I spent hours in the British Library, combing through every article on Modern Poetry just to find a single reference to Sylvia Plath. There was never enough time in the day to attend lectures, complete coursework and get a paycheque, let alone conduct research. Organising your thoughts and putting them together for a thesis in a structured way is another challenging performance in postgraduate research.
The good news? Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving rapidly. New tools are making research faster, writing easier, and juggling less exhausting. In this article, I will introduce some of the best AI tools for academic researchers and postgraduate students, and show how they can make your research more efficient, whilst reducing the cognitive load.
1. Consensus: AI-Powered Academic Research
If you are doing any type of scientific research, it is time to check out Consensus.
Built on the Semantic Scholar database, Consensus pulls from over 200 million papers across all scientific domains with data updated monthly. This AI-powered search engine does not simply find papers, it analyses, synthesises, and connects insights from real research.
Consensus uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to uncover the most relevant studies and find hidden connections between research topics. It recommends similar papers based on what you have already saved. Plus, its AI generates one-sentence summaries of papers, so you can quickly decide what is worth reading in depth.
Consensus is more than a search engine, it is an AI research assistant, designed to help you work smarter.
2. Research Rabbit: AI-Powered Academic Paper Discovery and Visualization
When you are conducting postgraduate research, scouring the web can be time-consuming and exhausting. Part of effective research is getting a solid understanding of your subject by visualising and understanding the connections between studies and tracking the themes without getting lost in all the detail.
That is where Consensus and Research Rabbit can help you with your studies.
Just like Spotify, you can add academic papers to your collection, and Research Rabbit learns what you love, refining recommendations over time. It will keep you up to date with the latest papers in your field without cluttering your inbox. There is no spam, only relevant recommendations.
Personally, I love the interactive visualisations that let you dive deeper, mapping networks of papers and co-authorships as new starting points for your studies. You can collaborate on collections, leave comments, and even kickstart someone else’s research process.
As Sylvia Plath once wrote, "Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” When your research is well-organised it empowers you to think critically, make new connections and push your ideas further.
2. Elicit: AI-Powered Research Assistant
For most postgraduate students, the reading list can be an endless abyss. You have saved dozens of academic papers, but who has the time to skim through them all just to pull out insights? That is where Elicit comes in.
Elicit does the heavy lifting for you. It analyzes research papers at superhuman speed, automating tasks like summarizing articles, extracting data and identifying key findings.
With Elicit, you can search for research papers and get a list of relevant studies from a database of 125 million papers. It provides one-sentence summaries of abstracts, making it easier to assess relevance at a glance.
In a user survey, 10% of respondents said it saved them five or more hours per week. It cuts the time and cost of manual research extraction by 50%. Elicit tends to work best with empirical data from scientific studies. . This type of research is common in biomedicine and machine learning.
4. Connected Papers: AI-Powered Citation Mapping
Writing a thesis is not just about citing sources, it is about understanding how ideas evolve. Connected Papers helps postgraduate students visualise and explore research networks, signposting them to most relevant work in their area of study.
Instead of manually searching for references, Connected Papers uses AI-driven citation mapping to build interactive graphs that reveal relationships between studies. Simply enter a key paper and the system generates a network of related research, making it easy to trace the evolution of ideas, uncover foundational works, and ensure no critical study is overlooked. Whether you are diving into a new field, filling gaps in your bibliography or identifying important prior and derivative works, Connected Papers simplifies the process.
5. Writefull: AI-Powered Research Paper Writing
Developed by a team of PhDs in AI and linguistics, Writefull is designed for academic research and an essential tool for postgraduate students. Unlike Grammarly, which focuses on everyday writing, Writefull provides specialised language feedback using AI trained on millions of journal articles.
Academic writing can be hard but Writefull’s AI helps you write, paraphrase, edit, and refine your work with ease. It is particularly useful for neurodivergent students, catching mistakes other tools might miss. Unlike generic grammar checkers, it edits specifically for academic writing.
Beyond language checks, Writefull offers AI-powered tools to help summarize research, restructure sentences, and generate abstracts and titles. It also supports LaTeX-specific edits for Overleaf users and provides track changes for submission-ready documents. With an encrypted connection, your work remains private and secure.
6. Scholarcy: AI-Powered Research Accelerator
Imagine having someone sift through all the papers you have saved, pulling out only the key points so you do not have to spend hours skimming articles. That is exactly what Scholarcy does.
Scholarcy breaks down academic articles, reports, and book chapters into digestible sections, highlighting key findings, limitations, and comparisons with earlier studies. It streamlines the research process, helping you quickly determine a paper’s relevance without wading through dense academic language.
For researchers and students, Scholarcy has been shown to significantly cut down reading time, freeing you up to focus on the most valuable studies. Plus, it turns citations into links so that you can jump straight to related papers and expand your research.
Scholarcy is not just a summarisation tool, it is a research accelerator, helping you navigate and understand complex academic material more easily.
If you find yourself juggling multiple academic tasks the old-fashioned way, save yourself the aggravation and try these AI-powered tools. You might be able to leave the library early, catch-up with some friends or find some time for yourself.