SciSpace Versus AnswerThis: Which Research Assistant is Best?

SciSpace AI and AnswerThis Comparison

AnswerThis and SciSpace are two cutting-edge AI tools revolutionizing the research landscape. Designed to simplify and enhance the research process, these AI-powered platforms help scholars efficiently manage their studies—whether by organizing files, accessing relevant academic sources, generating key insights, or writing research papers.

While both tools offer advanced capabilities, their functionalities cater to different research needs. This article aims to explore their similarities, differences, strengths, and limitations, to provide users with a clear understanding of which tool best suits their requirements and how to leverage their features effectively.

What is AnswerThis?

The AnswerThis Research Assistant AI represents a significant advancement in the field of automated literature review and information synthesis. AnswerThis aims to streamline the research process by providing users with comprehensive, evidence-based answers to complex questions, while drawing upon a vast repository of scholarly articles and research data.

In addition to providing a Literature Review with references to all pertinent citations, AnswerThis also provides an intuitive editor which allows researchers to generate abstracts, summaries, research questions and paraphrase or refine text. Researchers can upload all their relevant documents into their AnswerThis library, working in conjunction with the editor to provide easy access to citations and a convenient writing experience. AnswerThis provides AI assistance throughout every part of the research process, from the identification of a research subject to the finalization of a paper.

What is SciSpace?

SciSpace Ai is a search engine platform that leverages AI to help researchers generate literature reviews, and extract statistics by searching for academia relevant to the question you ask. When queried, SciSpace will provide a summary of relevant materials, with references to the cited papers alongside a summary of each.

SciSpace boasts many features, the most popular being the ability to chat with PDF's, used for analyzing PDFs and receiving answers backed by citations. SciSpace also provides an AI Writer, which utilizes AI to convert rough notes into comprehensive paragraphs. Other great features for researchers and students include Literature Reviews, allowing researchers to discover new papers, a Citation Generation with support for over 2,300 styles, and an AI Detector ideal for nit-picking AI content within the users research papers.

Primary Functions of AnswerThis

Research Discovery

AnswerThis provides comprehensive literature reviews to research questions from a database of over 250 million research papers from trusted and verified sources to streamline the research process. A prompt helper provides structured answers, ranging from gaps in research to quantitative analysis. Searches are highly customizable, choosing from full literature reviews to basic AI responses, filtering papers by number of citations, or double checking citations. In addition to the response to the query, AnswerThis provides citations for all articles used as well as short summaries for each.

Citation Assistance

Line by line citations in generated responses make it simple to determine sources for research and prevent hallucinations, and citations can easily be stored in your library for future reference. AnswerThis also has a Citation Map, which takes a given source and displays connected papers and the nature of their relation, providing convenient access to similar research while making it simple to verify the quality of the article.

Document and Paper Management

AnswerThis contains an expansive Library function, allowing users to quickly store citations, papers, and any imported files. AnswerThis also provides the capacity to export documents to a reference manager of choice, or import BIB files. The projects tab lets the user organize files in one convenient place by research matter, ensuring a clean and streamlined experience.

Writing Assistance

The Editor provides a dynamic, user controlled experience allowing for convenient altering and creation of documents from the Users library, generated responses, or uploaded files. With full AI integration, users can generate structured outlines, reword sections, and automatically expand passages. A seamless preview function enables users to review changes before accepting them, offering better control and coherence in their work.

PDF Analysis and Breakdown

AnswerThis allows users to “chat” with PDFs, either uploaded or from their library, explaining and providing insight on the subject. The user can highlight segments for a more focused description, and can ask further questions on the subjects to save time in gaining understanding of complex subject matters.

Primary Functions of SciSpace

Research Discovery

General queries can be made with SciSpace to identify topics of interest.

For literature review queries, choose from standard, high quality, or deep review to create a literature review. For Deep Review, sci space asks clarifying questions to make sure the question is properly understood. It will produce an initial summary list of citations, title and abstract but no access to the text of the documents. The AI continues to ask additional questions to narrow down the number of citations for the literature review. After the AI feels that it has an appropriate set, it will produce a list of citations that include a high level bullet point summary detailing why each particular paper has been included. SciSpace will then detail the entire thought process of the model before it begins to construct the literature review document.

Citation Assistance

Citations for literature reviews are produced via the AI driven steps listed above in Research Discovery. Scispace AI also asks multiple questions during the process to reduce the number of citations to a manageable and well targeted amount. Once the literature review is completed the user can fully examine the listed citations, and select preferred papers. The SciSpace APA Citation Generator also provides numerous citation styles for use.

Document and Paper Management

SciSpace offers users the ability to manage references through Mendeley and other reference materials. SciSpace can take selected PDF’s and turn it into a video with voice overs, subtitles and transitions.

Writing Assistance

SciSpace users can either begin writing a paper themselves or choose from a template to simplify the process. With a few clicks citations can be added or removed. Users can also use AI to complete the writing by making suggestions, which can be accepted or rejected during the writing process. SciSpace can paraphrase writing with options for formal tones or creative tones. SciSpace’s Academic AI Detector allows the user to input text or a PDF and it will produce a report detailing the level of AI.

PDF Analysis and Breakdown

Extract data from PDF research papers and get summary, conclusions, and findings produced in a table format. Scispace also offers the ability to transform PDF’s into videos, equipped with voiceovers, transitions and subtitles.

Comparative Analysis

Key Differences

1. AnswerThis has much more complete and easy to use writing and editing capabilities. AnswerThis provides robust citation management which is significantly superior to the SciSpace offering. AnswerThis provides a very wide range of discovery options, allowing a user to have the control to perform a task (query, citation and document creation) very quickly or to take additional steps in order to facilitate a much more refined search.

2. SciSpace can quickly generate queries and create documents with citations. It does not provide the user many options to customize and choose along the way.

Recommendation

• Choose AnswerThis if you need a complete research management tool, including literature reviews, sophisticated citation analysis, structured research workflows, and full editing capabilities. Try it today for Free!

• Choose Sci Space if you primarily need a tool to help you read, summarize, and understand academic papers more effectively.