Top 5 of AI tools for PhD students in 2025

Written by Anastassia Walford

Writing a research paper as a PhD student can be a daunting task, especially when exploring a modern, less-discussed subject. As a postgraduate student, it is normal to feel pressured to give your best in your final doctoral work — perhaps even hoping that your hard work will introduce a fresh perspective to your field.

Luckily, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping academic research, offering innovative ways to navigate scholastic challenges. Rather than replacing researchers, AI acts as a powerful assistant: it streamlines analysis, enhances efficiency, and opens new avenues for exploration. There are a multitude of artificial intelligence programs, so many that you may not know where to start!

This is where this article comes handy. Here, you will find the top 5 AI tools to help PhD students with their paper. Just as you aim to be precise in your work, this list gets straight to the point: it features a variety of AI tools, from grammar assistants to those that help summarise and categorise scientific reports, making your research process smoother, while staying ethical (to find out more what it means to be an ethical AI tool, check out this article). We've also written another article that teaches you how to ethically use AI for your studies.

1: thesify: Best for Academic feedback 

As we already presented thesify in our latest blog “10 best AI tools for academic writing”, which give you a more general overview of what’s on the market, thesify is an AI powered tool that assists you with a professor-like evaluation. Most students struggle to get clear, structured feedback on their writing, because of the lack of time their professor can allow to them. This is where thesify bridges the gap: it provides feedback on your work, explaining why your argument is strong or weak.  

More than grammar correction, it identifies weaknesses in argumentation and structure. Perfect for thesis writing, it helps you strengthen arguments and improves the impact of your work.

With Thesify, turn weak essays into compelling, well-structured arguments—helping you write with clarity, confidence, and academic excellence.

2: Elicit: Best for data extraction and summaries

For postgraduate students, the reading list can feel overwhelming, with dozens of papers saved but little time to read all of them and extract key insights. Elicit facilitates this process by helping you with data extraction, summarising articles, and identifying key insights with the power of AI. 

It provides one-sentence summaries of abstracts from a database of 125+ million papers, helping you quickly assess their relevance. It also enables you to extract data from hundreds of papers in minutes, as well as reviewing and selecting relevant research papers, generating relevant criteria and judgments with a single click. All data extractions are fully citable, and supported by quotes from the original papers. 

With Elicit, you can quickly identify the most important papers in a field, trace any claim back to its source, and dive deep into relevant research, streamlining your academic workflow.

3: Research Rabbit: Best for literature mapping 

If you like Spotify, you will love Research Rabbit ! This tool is a free online assistant to help you with visualising papers, discovering new authors and sharing your articles collections with a mapping program. 

This tool allows students to create collections based on their research focus. You can start by looking up a title or keywords, find the thesis in the results, and add it to your collection. You can expand the details of the paper by displaying its abstract and comments you wrote. From there, selecting a paper will allow you to explore similar ones, as well as references and citations from your original paper. You can also explore additional works from the same or related authors.

Research Rabbit helps you visualise your secondary literature and sources by providing you with a striking visual map. For all the visual learners, this tool is for you! 

4: Scite AI: Best for citation analysis

Referencing and finding good resources can sometimes be a difficult task that most students leave for the last minute. From the different ways to reference books and articles, to the difficult task of finding who’s the author, or the co-author, or the director or the translator (and so on), you can spend a lot of time on that. This is where you should use Scite AI: it leverages artificial intelligence to enhance the research experience for academics and professionals. By analysing over 1.2 billion citations across more than 200 million sources, this tool offers a comprehensive understanding of how research articles are cited, providing deeper insights into their impact and relevance.

Scite uses the Smart Citations feature, allowing you to better understand the links between references by categorising citations into three distinct types: supporting, contrasting and mentioning. Each of these allow users to assess not just the quantity but the quality and context of citations, offering a clearer view of a paper's influence.

Using Scite AI enables you to delve into the specific context in which a paper is cited, having a holistic view of literature review, as well as providing accurate and reliable citation analyses based on their vast database. 

5: Trinka: Best for Academic grammar checker

As PhD students, the grammar and spelling can still be an obstacle for a perfect thesis, especially if it’s finished on a short deadline and you don’t have the time to meticulously revise your paper. This is where you should check the last tool of our top 5 list: Trinka. This AI powered writing assistant is made specifically for academic and technical writing, helping researchers and professionals by proofreading their paper from grammar and spelling mistakes. 

Trinka helps you by identifying grammatical errors, analysing sentence structure, suggesting optimal word choices, and ensuring adherence to both US and UK English styles. It also catches inconsistencies in your text, suggests inclusive language, as well as helps you with citations and plagiarism checks. This tool does also take seriously the issue of confidentiality, by protecting your data privacy and making sure they are strongly encrypted and securely stored.

In short, if you need a good proofreading tool, you should check Trinka’s website. It can help you take your thesis to the next level and bring out its full potential.

Heading toward success!

Here we are at the end of our article on the Top 5 AI tools for PhD students. As we've seen, artificial intelligence doesn't replace human intelligence. It complements it, allowing you to focus on the core of your work. As a future PhD graduate, these tools can help you manage the small but time-consuming details of your thesis, letting you concentrate on your ideas and research, and ultimately produce the best version of your paper. 

Stay focused, you can do it!