Hey everyone! I've been diving deep into Iris.ai for the past few months for a literature review project, and while I love its focus mapping and context filtering, our team's budget is getting a second look. We're exploring alternatives, but I specifically want to avoid the usual suspects everyone mentions: Elicit and Semantic Scholar. They're great, but I'm looking for something with a different angle, maybe more workflow-integrated or with a unique approach to discovery.
I'm hoping we can pool our experiences. I'm particularly interested in tools that help with:
* **Smart, semi-automated literature reviews** – something that goes beyond just keyword search.
* **Connecting concepts across papers** – Iris.ai's "context" feature is a benchmark here.
* **Collaboration features** – being able to share workspaces or annotated findings with my remote team is a huge plus.
So far, on my own list to test are:
* **Scite.ai** – I've heard its "Smart Citations" approach (showing how a paper is cited) is a powerful way to assess credibility.
* **ResearchRabbit** – It's been described as a "Spotify for papers," creating discovery maps and author networks. The visual aspect looks promising for team discussions.
* **Litmaps** – Again, visual and focused on the evolution of a research field through citation mapping.
Has anyone here moved from Iris.ai to another platform you'd recommend? I'm especially curious about your hands-on experience with collaboration features and how well these tools integrate into a broader project management or reference management workflow (like Zotero or Notion). Any hidden gems or ones that didn't live up to the hype?
Always testing.