ELICIT: An excellent AI tool to help with literature reviews

 Just tried ELICIT: https://elicit.com/

Found that it's a fanastic AI tool for helping researchers with literature reviews. 

Here is what I did: 

1. In the prompt box, I typed in a rough question: "How might ChatGPT help with university students' academic writing ability?

2. It asked me to refine my question a bit. In fact, it suggested 3 possibilities. I simply chose one of the three suggestions: "How does the use of ChatGPT affect the quality of academic writing, as measured by grammar, coherence, and citation accuracy, among university students?

3. I clicked on 'Generate'.

4. ELICIT then started a process of about 4 minutes which included: 

- looking for relevant journal articles; 

- screening them to include those which were most relevant to the literature search question; and

- generating a literature review report, which included a summary of the methods used; the findings, etc. 

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The resulting literature review report can be text-copied, or downloaded as a PDF file. Below is the PDF file: 

Elicit - Impact of ChatGPT on Academic Writing Quality - Report.pdf

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MY OVERALL views: 

1. It is doing an excellent job and saves researchers huge amounts of time looking up the relevant journal articles, reading them, and summarising from them. 

2. Of course, we may be concerned whether ELICIT is able to access those prestige journals which require university accounts to reach, or whether ELICIT is only working with publicly accessible journal articles. At the moment, a glance at the list of references in the above report suggests that it may be the latter case. 

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3. Another approach is for users to upload some relevant papers they have already found, and ask ELICIT to summarise those papers for them. The free plan, it seems, will only work with 4 papers. And then of course, you have to do some initial search yourself (e.g., with ERIC) to find some relevant papers first.