Google's AI tool for Academics and Students Dear Scholar, NotebookLM is a tool developed by Google and released about a year ago. It can process up to 300 PDFs and create mind maps, records, flashcards, quizzes, and even videos of your content. Ever since it was released in 2024, it has become one of my favourite tools for a literature review. In recent months, I have implemented major updates that I would like to dedicate this week's newsletter to. As a reader of this newsletter, you may...
28 days ago • 1 min read
In-Depth Review of Liner: AI Agents for Every Part of the Academic Workflow Dear Scholar, AI agents are quickly evolving to become the next frontier in AI, as they can solve far more complex use cases than a simple large language model alone, even when supplemented with an academic database. (Check out the infographic below). This week, I am testing Liner, a tool that has been around for many years but just recently switched its focus to academic AI. Currently, Liner offers five AI agents for...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
AI Literature Review Workflow in 2025 Dear Scholar, When I published my literature review workflow diagram, it garnered positive and negative reactions. Surprisingly, a lot of academics reject the idea that AI should be used in literature reviews because we as scientists will not be able to maintain our creativity or learn much. Here are some reactions: All of these criticisms come from senior academics with years of experience. For instance, the professor on the top left rejects AI-written...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Academic Writing Apps Comparison Dear Scholar, In this week’s article, I want to compare three tools for academic writing: PaperPal, which is made for academics, ChatGPT, a general-purpose tool and Grammarly, which is optimised for grammar. It turns out there is no best tool out there. The question is, rather, when should you use which tool? This article suggests using ChatGPT in the brainstorming and ideation phase of your writing due to its general purpose and customizability. Then move on...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
The AI-readiness checklist Dear Scholar, Everybody has heard about AI, but very few have mastered the art of using it effectively. I decided to design a small test that will help you determine how good you are at using AI as an academic. Answer these 10 yes/no questions to find out your AI readiness score. The article also features in-depth explanations and links in case you couldn't answer something and would like to know more about the topic. Read this week's blogpost & take the test Free...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Digital Note Taking Obsidian 1.9 released with a magnificent new feature: Bases Dear Scholar, Obsidian is my software of choice when it comes to organising academic information. I have used this tool for many years and accumulated hundreds of thousands of words in notes. This week, the team behind Obsidian released a new version, 1.9, that features a very long-awaited update called Bases. I spent many hours experimenting with it and discovering new ways to organise my information and navigate...
2 months ago • 1 min read
ChatGPT-5 Update for Academics Dear Scholar, The big topic in AI news this week has been the release of ChatGPT-5 just a few days ago. I spent my weekend testing out different scenarios and writing an in-depth review of what has changed and how that influences your academic career. For those who have purchased my Effortless AI course, I have also recorded two new videos about the details and implications of this major release. Subjectively speaking, GPT-5 is just a better, more intuitive...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Agentic AI finds new research ideas Dear Scholar, A new type of AI has been released this week: AI Agents. Instead of answering a query in one step, like a generative AI, an agent has a goal, and it will plan, search, and review results to achieve it (see diagram below). This involves many iterations and can easily take 15 minutes. The SciSpace AI agent does this for academics and searches academic papers, rather than the internet, as the ChatGPT agent does. You can imagine that this opens...
3 months ago • 1 min read
AI Atomic Sentences For Academic Writing Dear Scholar, My core approach to research involves breaking complex ideas down into atomic statements (or notes) and then creatively finding new connections to form new ideas. This method also works for academic writing, and it helped me to write my last paper in record time! In today's brief tutorial, I will share with you an AI assistant (prompt and link included) that breaks down complex papers into concise, simple sentences. These atomic sentences...
3 months ago • 2 min read