Table of Contents
- SciSpace Versus AnswerThis: Which Research Assistant is Best?
- SciSpace AI and AnswerThis Comparison
- What is AnswerThis?
- What is SciSpace?
- Primary Functions of AnswerThis
- Research Discovery
- Citation Assistance
- Document and Paper Management
- Writing Assistance
- PDF Analysis and Breakdown
- Primary Functions of SciSpace
- Research Discovery
- Citation Assistance
- Document and Paper Management
- Writing Assistance
- PDF Analysis and Breakdown
- Comparative Analysis
- Key Differences
- Recommendation
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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
Feature | AnswerThis | SciSpace |
Main Purpose | AI-powered research assistant for literature reviews, citation analysis, and full life cycle research management | AI-powered tool for understanding, summarizing, and citing research papers |
Paper Search & Summarization | Finds and summarizes relevant studies with paragraph-level citations | Searches academic papers and provides AI-generated summaries |
Literature Review Generation | Creates structured literature reviews with citations and research context | Provides explanations of concepts in research papers |
Citation Management | Generates citation maps, manages citations in library function and exports references to BibTeX | Extracts citations from papers and allows basic management and exporting of citations |
Chat with PDFs | Yes, allows users to ask research questions directly within PDFs, including explanations of highlighted text in PDFs | Yes, provides explanations of highlighted text in PDFs |
Research Question Suggestions | Yes, suggests research questions and identifies research gaps | No, focuses on paper summaries rather than research gap analysis |
Research Proposal & Project Reports | Yes, helps create research proposals and manage entire research projects | No, primarily aids in reading and comprehension of papers |
Filtering & Customization | Allows filtering by journal quality, domain types (.gov, .edu), or by publication dates | Limited to academic paper search without advanced filtering |
Diagram & Chart Generation | Yes, visualizes research insights with diagrams and charts | No, focuses on textual
summaries |
AI Research Modes | Offers citation-backed structured literature reviews, or fast AI-only response modes | Provides explanations but lacks structured research modes |
Security & Privacy | Ensures data privacy and does not share user data | Standard security but no emphasis on data privacy policies |
Ease of Use | Easy to use for basic functions, provides convenient tutorials for more complex features | Relatively easy to use, potential learning curve |
Installation Requirements | No installation required, web app can be accessed from anywhere | No installation required, web app can be accessed from anywhere |
Cost | User pricing is $35 per month, unlimited use of all aspects of the product | Unlimited use of all features is $90 per month |
Uploadable formats | PDFs, URLs, RIS, BIB CSV files | PDF file formats |
Usage Details for Free Version | 10 credits allowing for full test use of the product | 30 output previews, download up to 1,000 words and 5 bibliography downloads allowed |
Best For | Students and researchers managing full research projects, literature reviews, and citation tracking | Students and researchers who need quick explanations of research papers |
Key Differences
- 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.
- 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.
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