Exploring AI Tools for Literature Review

 Exploring AI Tools for Literature Review


For years, I meant to establish a strong theoretical foundation in facilitative leadership and conduct a comprehensive literature review. Today, I explored several AI tools and compared them with the results from Google Scholar. Below is my journey.

1. Google Scholar (scholar.google.com)

I typed in "facilitative leadership" in Google Scholar. There were 83,600 results. Among the first 10 results, 6 seemed to be highly relevant for providing a theoretical foundation.

2. Consensus (consensus.app) 

Consensus is a free AI tool that provides answers to questions based on research papers. You can create an account using your email address. You search by asking a question. I entered my first question: What is facilitative leadership?



Consensus gave me 10 sources:

Compared to the results from Google Scholar, the sources pulled were more discipline-specific, thus less suitable to provide a general theoretical foundation. But, it returned with a definition of facilitative leadership from each source. It also indicated where in the article the answer came from (e.g., Literature Review), whether it's from a rigorous journal, or highly cited.

At the end of the results, it provided related searches:
  • What are the essential core processes for facilitative leadership?
  • How does facilitative leadership contribute to organizational change?
  • What is the role of facilitative leadership in urban governance?
You can click on each result, and then it leads to the source, with a link to the text and an abstract.


I refined my questions to: What is the role of facilitative leadership in higher education? It returned 9 sources. Some are highly discipline-specific sources (e.g., medical education, nurse education, computer science education). Some are more generic like below:
  • Unpacking the roles of the facilitator in higher education professional learning communities from Educational Research and Evaluation (2016)
  • Facilitation as a Method of Forming a Favorable Socio-Psychological Climate and Partnership in a Higher Education Institution from Education and Pedagogical Sciences (2022)
  • The alchemy of facilitation revealed through individual stories and collective narrative from Reflective Practice (2017)
These sources are also more recent than Google Scholar's results.

I turned on Synthesize and Copilot tool. Below is the result:

...

The resulting summary gave a short synthesis of the 9 sources from the returned search. The Copilot summarized each source and provided a conclusion at the end that synthesized the 9 sources.

3. Semantic Scholar (semanticscholar.org)


Semantic Scholar is a free AI tool to search scientific literature. you can create a free account and sign in through Google email. If you sign in, you can save sources from a search. You can create your own research dashboard and receive a research paper feed after identifying three papers that influence your research.

Similar to using Google Scholar, you enter keywords for the search. I entered "facilitative leadership."

It resulted in 2,510,000 results, a lot more than from Google Scholar. Different from the results from Consensus, where many sources came from the medical field, Semantic Scholar's sources were mostly based on political science and they are recent. All sources on the first page were dated 2013 or later. 

One can select fields of study to include. You can choose only the ones that have PDF, and so on. For each source returned, you can see how well it has been cited. You can click on "Expand" to see the large text context for the keywords. The overall impression is that Semantic Scholar favors recency over relevance.

4. Elicit (elicit.com)

Elicit searches, summarizes, and organizes literature. You can create a free basic account with 500 credits and log in with a Google email account. Enter a search question. I entered "What is facilitative leadership?" It gave me 8 results, most were quite general and relevant. 

It provided a summary of the top 4 papers for free. For each paper, it provided the source link, which led to the Semantic Scholar's entry for that article and an abstract summary. If you are a paid user, you can download the table with the title, abstract summary, and additional columns as a CSV file. 


Running the searches (or workflow) costs credits, and if you run out, you will have to upgrade to the Plus Plan for $120 a year or $12/month, which gives you:
  • 12,000 credits per month
  • Buy more credits as needed
  • Summarize up to 8 papers
  • Export results to CSV and BIB
Your search or workflow is saved for the session. You can call up this workflow with the same search results. My search cost me 69 credits probably because I was trying to load more (with 16 results) and add additional columns (e.g., methodology). A usual simple search would cost 20-35 credits. 

5. ResearchRabbit (researchrabbit.ai)

ResearchRabbit is a free AI tool that can create a collection of literature and can visualize the relationship between papers, often referred to as a "citation-based literature mapping tool." You generate a collection of literature and the tool will recommend additional ones to include.

When you log in, choose New Collection. I added Facilitative Leadership. 
Click on that collection, a panel to the right of the collection shows up. Click Add Papers. 
You can add a paper that you know or search by keywords. I entered "facilitative leadership," it asked me to choose a search provider. The choices are Biomedical and Life Sciences or All Subject Areas. I chose the latter, which is powered by Semantic Scholar.

The rabbit hole starts after you establish your initial collection. Click on each item in your collection, you can explore Similar Work, All References, All Citations, each presents a list of literature that you can explore and add to your collection.

6. ChatPDF (chatpdf.com)

Through all these searches, I have identified one piece of literature critical to forming my theoretical foundation: Hord's (1992) Facilitative Leadership: The Imperative for Change. However, this is a 90-page manuscript. How can I quickly understand the content? I used ChatPDF. Drag any PDF into the interface. No sign-in is required. You can save your chat history if you sign in.

I uploaded the PDF of Hord (1992) and it returned with a quick summary and three guiding questions to explore, like "What are some key characteristics of facilitative leadership as discussed in the document?"

You can click on a question or enter a new question, and then ChatPDF will respond to your question with information from the article while referencing the page number for you to verify.

Citing AI Work

We use AI tools to explore, locate, and identify relevant sources and information. As an author of any intellectual work, we still need to go into the sources to verify the information, derive the most pertinent meaning, and organize the sources to serve our purposes. AI can assist and provide inspiration. It should not replace our thought process in the literature review process.  

When we need to take AI's work as is or acknowledge AI's contribution, we need to cite AI's work. We can borrow the ideas from citing ChatGPT to cite these tools listed above. 

APA Style Example

  • Reference citation: 
OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat
  • In-text citation: (OpenAI, 2024)
  • Narrative citation: OpenAI (2024)

MLA Style Example

  • Reference citation: 
"What is facilitative leadership" prompt. ChatGPT, version 3.5, OpenAI, 20 Feb. 2024, 
https://chat.openai.com/chat
  • In-text citation: ("What is facilitative")


Now is the time to have a cup of tea and get the reading and note-taking started!




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