Literature Review Tools
Research faster, broader, better. AI charged.
The Iris.ai tool suite is aimed specifically at researchers in the early phase of a new project. They are especially suitable for interdisciplinary projects where the combination of knowledge from across a range of research fields will be vital to the project’s success.
THE EXPLORE TOOL
Exploration of interdisciplinary research
Consistently outperforming old school search tools, Iris.ai starts from a paper of your choice or a self-written problem statement. It “fingerprints” it based on machine extracted keywords, contextual synonyms and hypernyms, and matches the fingerprint against >200M Open Access papers, Patents and even EU Funded research projects, or your institution’s paywalled content.
Bypass Keywords
Traditional keyword searches limit you to what you already know. Great when you know what you’re looking for, but a big problem when you don’t.
Bypass Citations
The citation system is great for learning about researcher networks. For finding new solutions they can be unhelpful at best, or introduce popularity bias at worst.
Navigate papers visually
Endless result lists are terrible for quickly getting an overview. The Iris.ai maps give you a visual overview of the topics for a much faster distilling of the content.
Advanced editing and filtering
You can edit the core fingerprint of the article or your input problem statement to sharpen your results – or filter by repositories to include or exclude (Arxiv? PubMed?) or even by relevance score.
Bookmark, save and export
Find something interesting? Bookmark it into your reading list to dig into it later, or export the entire result list as CSV, or as BibTex to import to your favorite reference manager.
Reproducibility
The searches are not shaped by your search history to be reproducible – and everything is saved in your account, if you need to revisit later.
THE FOCUS TOOL
Narrow down to a precise list
Import a large set of papers either from your Explore maps or a Dropbox/Drive folder and use the iterative Focus tool to narrow down to a precise reading list – first using Concepts found in the papers, then Topics modeled from the papers for increased granularity.
Iteratively narrow down results list
The Focus feature allows the user to iteratively narrow down a corpus of up to 20,000 documents, to a short comprehensive reading list.
Corpus based criteria suggestions
In the Focus process, the tool suggests topics for inclusion and exclusion based on the initial corpus, facilitating a rapid and precise iterative filtering.
Manual precision/recall validation
With optional manual verification, the user can measure the precision and recall of the filtered corpus – building confidence with the results.
FEATURES ROADMAP
The road towards an accessible science world

The Iris.ai products semi-automate the existing research process – currently for the first two steps of the process: Broadly exploring the topic for an overview, and then narrowing down to a precise reading list.
Write out the problem you are trying to solve in your own words.
Use 300-500 words, and make sure to cover the problem from multiple angles.
Iris.ai uses this text to build a fingerprint of the problem, matches it against >200M research papers, patents or funded EU projects, and distributes them into topics.
Use the visual maps to gain an overview of your problem.
Build new maps from other articles or new text where more content or deeper exploration is needed.
“Jump into the rabbit hole of science” as a user once called it.
Use the hierarchy editor to fine-tune your map results.
Allowing you a bit more control over the exploration, the hierarchy editor lets you explore the fingerprint; merging words, selecting synonyms and deleting concepts that are currently irrelevant to you.
Bookmark papers and maps for later visits.
Build a reading list of specific papers you wish to read later.
Bookmark full maps for use in the next phase with the Focus tool.