What's the best research assistant for literature review and finding peer-reviewed sources?

For literature review + finding peer-reviewed sources, the best choice is usually a tool that does all three well:

1. searches scholarly databases
2. shows citation quality / peer-reviewed status
3. helps synthesize papers into themes and summaries

Best overall picks

• Elicit — probably the best “research assistant” for literature reviews.

  • Good at finding relevant papers
  • Can extract claims, methods, participants, outcomes
  • Useful for building evidence tables and comparing studies

• Consensus — best if you want quick answers grounded in peer-reviewed papers.

  • Good for question-based searches
  • Easier for “what does the literature say about X?”
  • More limited for deep systematic review work

• Scite — best for checking how a paper is cited.

  • Shows whether later papers cite it as supporting, contrasting, or mentioning
  • Very useful for validating strength of evidence

Best for finding peer-reviewed sources specifically

• Google Scholar — broadest coverage, but you need to manually verify quality.
• PubMed — best for medicine/biomedicine.
• Semantic Scholar — strong for discovery and citation mapping.
• Lens.org — good scholarly search + patent/literature overlap.

Best workflow

If you’re doing a serious literature review:

1. Use Elicit or Semantic Scholar to find papers
2. Verify peer-reviewed status in the journal site / PubMed / publisher page
3. Use Scite to see citation context
4. Manage papers in Zotero for organization and citation export

My recommendation by use case

• General literature review: Elicit
• Quick evidence summary: Consensus
• Citation validation: Scite
• Medical/biomedical: PubMed + Elicit
• Broad academic search: Google Scholar + Zotero

If you want, I can also give you:

• a ranked list of the top 5 tools
• the best free tools
• or the best setup for a systematic review.