Anyone Tried Automating Paper Reviews with AI?
I'm a master's student, and with so many papers to read each week, I'm trying to leverage AI. I've been putting PDFs into ChatGPT to summarize them, and it's fairly useful, but it often misses important details. Does anyone have AI tools or workflows specifically tailored for paper reviews they could share?
7 answers
I've had similar concerns, and these days I'm using paper-specific AI tools like Semantic Scholar or Elicit. They capture citation relationships and experimental results better than ChatGPT. In particular, Elicit works by finding answers to research questions, which reduces the chance of missing details.
Just a tip from experience: before feeding a paper into ChatGPT, break it down section by section and ask for summaries. For example, 'Summarize only the Introduction' → 'Summarize only the Methodology.' It significantly reduces detail loss. Give it a try!
I'm using Notion AI integrated with Zotero. I organize papers in Zotero, and when I summarize them with Notion AI, it maintains context well. However, I still need to check mathematical formulas or experimental details manually. Full automation seems out of reach for now.
Have you tried Scholarcy? It's a tool specialized for paper reviews that automatically extracts key findings and limitations. There's a free version, so give it a test. The downside is that it has limited support for Korean papers, but it works well if you're mainly dealing with English ones.
On the other hand, I've done some prompt engineering with ChatGPT. When I give specific instructions like 'Summarize the core contributions, experimental setup, and limitations of this paper in three sentences each,' the details come out much more vividly. The prompt might be more important than the tool.
I had the same concern during my master's... In the end, I compromised by using AI only for drafting and reading important papers myself. Especially in the Discussion section, AI tends to miss a lot of nuances. If you want to save time, getting related paper recommendations through Research Rabbit is also a good option.
I use Perplexity AI by pasting a paper PDF link and asking questions. It shows sources right away, making it easy to check details, and it answers questions like 'What are the limitations of this method?' well. Even the free version is good enough to use!