The world of AI is growing exponentially every single day. If you are serious about using AI to improve your writing, you may decide to upgrade to ChatGPT-4 and install some excellent plugins that could make your writing easier. Read on to discover the top five AI plugins that can aid your academic writing without making you a cheater.
ScholarAI
Whether writing an essay, report, or dissertation, you will need to source information from various books and papers to signal a comprehensive understanding of the topic. Scholar AI plugin can help in this regard as it contains an extensive collection of academic literature. It covers subjects such as Science, Health and Medicine, Journalism, Business, and Law. You just need to tell AI your subject and/or topic and you will get a list of relevant literature, together with links to specific books or articles.
AskYourPDF
When writing academically, you will need to extract information from many sources. This is a lengthy process that requires browsing through many journal articles. AskYourPDF can make this process quicker. The plugin allows you to upload a PDF, such as a journal article, and summarise it in just a few steps. The AI will list key information from the article and propose a list of questions you can ask to understand the text better. It will even list page numbers where the extracted information is located so you can navigate the document quickly and save time.
LinkReader
Apart from scanning through PDF documents, AI plugins can help you skim through other sources relevant to your academic writing, such as lecture slides, Word files, and online links. One such plugin is LinkReader, which not only summarises the information from various sources but also helps you interpret, analyse, and explain them. This plugin is particularly useful when you need to understand the material at hand and prepare yourself for writing.
ShowMe
During your academic studies, there will be countless times you’ll need to prepare a figure or a graph. This could present a summary of a particular model and its components, the thematic map of your qualitative findings, or a graph summarising some statistical results. ShowMe is a plugin that can help you produce compelling graphs. You’ll just need to provide information on the contents of the graph, and the plugin will generate one for you.
BibGuru
The last way AI plugins can aid your academic writing is by generating your reference list. Try BibGuru – one such plugin that generates citations in various formats, including but not limited to APA, Harvard, Vancouver, and Chicago. The plugin is easy to use – you’ll just need to search the title of an article or a book or drop the URL of a website, and you’ll get a matching reference in a second.
Read Also: AI Tools That Can Help You Manage Your References
A key message
If used correctly, AI plugins can make your writing easier. The top five plugins can help you locate and understand relevant sources for your paper, build figures and graphs, and generate reference lists. Note, however, that these plugins can be installed only if you upgrade to ChatGPT-4, and most of them require payment of their own. Thus, although useful, these plugins are not necessarily friendliest to students’ budgets.
