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Physical Therapy: AI Research Tools

IU Provided AI Chatbots

AI @ IU: AI tools recommended for use by IU faculty, staff, and students using their @iu.edu account, including:

When using these tools for research, you will need to carefully craft your prompt, and know that there is a higher risk that citations will be halluncinated.

(AI sources, tools, and recommendations are constantly changing. Visit AI at IU to see the most up to date recommendations.)

AI Research - Keep in Mind

  • These tools use semantic search to locate articles.  They are best searched by using natural language instead of keywords and subject headings.
  • Many of these tools search Semantic Scholar whose scope is smaller than Google Scholar and smaller than many library databases.  Therefore, you won't get a comprehensive search with one of these tools alone. However, because they use semantic search, you may find research you didn’t find using traditional keyword searching of library databases.
  • The Semantic Scholar database is not as current as Google Scholar or library databases.
  • Use these tools as research assistants, but always double-check citations.

Deep Search Tools

"Deep Search is an AI-enhanced way of searching for information. It builds on traditional web search by using advanced AI (like large language models) to better understand your query and search intent. Instead of just matching keywords, Deep Search tries to grasp what you really want to know, then scours the web more deeply to find the most relevant results" (Meynoush, 2025).

Name What it does Where it searches
SciSpace Generates lists of relevant academic/scientific papers based on a research query. Generates a summarized report and creates organized tables of articles used. Utilizes a repository of research papers instead of the open web. Semantic Scholar

Google Scholar Labs

It analyzes your question to identify its key topics, aspects and relationships. It then searches for all of them on Scholar, and evaluates the results to identify papers that answer the overall research question. For each paper, it provides a brief description of how the paper helps answer your question. And includes all the familiar Scholar features that you depend upon. You can ask follow up questions to dig deeper and explore specific nuances.

 Google Scholar

Semantic Scholar

 Semantic Scholar (which supplies underlying data for many of the other tools on this list) provides brief summaries ('TLDR's) of the main objectives and results of papers. Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at Ai2. Semantic Scholar
Ai2 Asta Find papers, summarize literature, and analyze data. Asta is built to mirror how scientific research—helping frame research questions, trace ideas to evidence, and clarify what’s established or still unresolved in a field. AstaBench evaluates agents against real-world tasks to build trust and scientific rigor. Semantic Scholar 

 

Meynoush. (2025, March 4). Deep Search vs Deep Research: What Are They and How Do They Compare? Medium. https://medium.com/@themeynoush/deep-search-vs-deep-research-what-are-they-and-how-do-they-compare-ac24db023002

Deep Research Tools

"Deep Research takes things a step further. If Deep Search is like digging up the raw information, Deep Research is like analyzing that information and presenting you with the insights. In Deep Research, an AI doesn’t just find relevant articles or data — it actually reads through those sources and synthesizes the findings into a coherent report or detailed answer for you, and at the end it generates new ideas" (Meynoush, 2025).

Name What it does Where it searches
Consensus AI-powered search engine that focuses on academic materials. Evaluates articles for relevance, impact, and how recently the article was published, and selects what it considers to be the best 20 sources. Then, it summarizes the findings from those articles, and for either/or and yes/no questions, shows which papers agree or disagree with the hypothesis. Helpful for getting started with scholarly research Semantic Scholar 
Google Gemini- Deep Research Gemini Deep Research offers in-depth results based on prompts, questions, and images in a conversational tone. Provides an editable research plan. Gemini will break down the problem into smaller tasks and present it to the user to refine. Creates report with summarized information. To use Gemini Deep Research, select Deep Research under Tools at the search box. The web. News media, blog content, and free full text publications
Perplexity- Deep Research Using LLMs, Perplexity is a search engine that provides AI-generated answers, including citations which are linked above the summaries. To use Perplexity's Deep Research function, select Deep Research under the plus (+) sign at the search box. The web. News media, blog content, and free full text publications
Elicit Elicit uses LLMs to find papers relevant to your topic by searching through papers and citations and extracting and synthesizing key information. Semantic Scholar

 

Meynoush. (2025, March 4). Deep Search vs Deep Research: What Are They and How Do They Compare? Medium. https://medium.com/@themeynoush/deep-search-vs-deep-research-what-are-they-and-how-do-they-compare-ac24db023002