Tool Review: Yomu.ai for Academic Writing Dear Scholar, I am currently refining my latest paper and experimenting with various tools to enhance my academic writing. Today, I want to present a deep dive into Yomu.ai, which might be the most collaborative academic writing tool. In my opinion, Yomu is more targeted at younger career researchers or academics who are pivoting to a new domain or doing cross-disciplinary research. A recent Nature study I was reading proposes that there is a "pivot...
29 days ago • 1 min read
Sponsor: Yomu.ai Yomu AI is a writing assistant for essays and research papers. It enables real-time collaboration and offers features like citation management (via Sourcely), text editing, feedback, and plagiarism checking—all in one place. Learn more about Yomu.ai Get 20% off monthly: EFFORTLESS20Get 40% off yearly: EFFORTLESS40 Tutorial: Following Journals, Authors, and Domains Dear Scholar, Most of you have developed a way of finding relevant literature for your work using various tools....
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Tool Review: Paperpal for writing papers Dear Scholar, Writing papers is a process that can feel glacially slow the closer the manuscript gets to submission (and the more authors are involved). Paperpal promises to make polishing and editing faster and easier using AI that has been specifically trained on academic texts. I previously wrote about Paperpal about a year ago. Like every AI tool, things have evolved, and it's time for an update. Paperpal has added features such as contextual...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Sponsor: Anara Anara uses AI to help researchers quickly understand dense materials, whether academic papers, books, or lecture recordings, while keeping everything organized and traceable. Learn more about Anara Get 20% off with code ILYA20 Tutorial: Styling Links with Obsidian Dear Scholar, The Academic Knowledge Management Webinar 2.0 just concluded with over 200 academics joining. During this and previous webinars, people repeatedly asked me one thing about my Obsidian vault: How do I...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Dear Scholar, I am currently conducting very data-intensive research that involves records from thousands of forest plots and measurements of millions of individual trees conducted over 50 years in New Zealand. A lot of data to analyze and find out how forests are changing. This massive data collection is aggregated from many sources, then cleaned, arranged, combined, filtered, recombined, processed, transformed, recleaned, and rearranged again. A very messy process that far surpasses the...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Dear Scholar, When doing innovative research, you need to do a lot of reading, looking for a tiny grain of insight or a gap that fits your research perfectly and allows you to identify new publishable insight. Most of what you read, though, is not strictly relevant. Looking for important, impactful questions can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. A new tool we are reviewing this week promises to help you find that needle using AI: Anara.com. Anara can combine insights from dozens...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Sponsor: Sourcely Sourcely is your AI-powered academic search assistant, offering access to over 200 million papers and advanced search filters. It streamlines research by finding credible sources, summarizing them, and exporting citations instantly—helping you save time and improve quality. Learn more about Sourcely Get 40% off with code Effortless40 (annual)or 20% off with Effortless20 (monthly) Dear Scholar, When I do a literature review, one of my biggest struggles is to keep papers...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Dear Scholar, This week, we are reviewing a different AI tool to help with academic writing. Instead of helping you to edit, WriteWise helps you start—and it does so by grounding its entire drafting system in the linguistic theories of John Swales. If you’ve ever taught students to identify the “research space” or structure an introduction using Swales’ CARS model, you understand what makes WriteWise different to ChatGPT or Paperpal. Writewise is designed to create first drafts, not finished...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Dear Scholar, Finding credible papers for an unfinished manuscript can make the difference between a good and an excellent paper, and it shouldn’t take longer than writing the paper. In this week's blog post, I tested Sourcely, an AI research assistant that matches academic sources directly to your text. Just paste in your draft, and it suggests peer-reviewed papers, highlights citation-worthy text, and summarizes them. You can export these citations, download the PDFs, and save everything in...
3 months ago • 1 min read