Organise, Structure and Draft Your Research Using SciSpace | Webinar with Omkar Jadhav

A research workflow that usually takes weeks—collecting papers, extracting what matters, and assembling a citation-backed draft—gets a new end-to-end path in SciSpace’s toolkit. The core promise is straightforward: turn a stack of domain papers into a publish-ready draft with citations, while keeping every claim anchored to the underlying text rather than floating on generic AI output.

The process starts in SciSpace Library, built to organize research from multiple entry points. Papers can be imported directly from Zotero in a two-click flow, after which SciSpace extracts structured information from each PDF and generates a short “ELDR” summary (three to five points) for quick recall later—even if the library grows to hundreds of files. For researchers who already have PDFs on their computer, SciSpace supports direct uploads and automatically pulls metadata such as title, authors, publication year, and journal. For papers discovered inside SciSpace’s own corpus (described as 220 million-plus hosted papers), a “bookmark” button saves relevant items into a chosen collection. A “request PDF” feature also addresses access gaps: when a paper isn’t open access, users can message the author requesting the PDF, and SciSpace sends the email on the user’s behalf.

Once the library is assembled, SciSpace Copilot helps synthesize it. “Library Insight” answers questions using only the imported documents, selecting the most relevant subset of papers and returning responses with citations. The system emphasizes traceability: each statement is tied to supporting text in the PDFs, with a “locate in PDF” option to jump directly to the exact paragraph. For deeper, paper-by-paper extraction, an “extract data” table can generate conclusions or other targeted fields for each selected PDF. Notes are handled inside the workflow too: a “save to notebook” button stores insights along with citations and a link back to the source answer, so context doesn’t get lost during drafting.

SciSpace Copilot also includes “Chat with PDF,” designed for close reading. Users can open a PDF and ask for explanations of selected text, or request breakdowns of math, tables, and figures via an “explain math and table” function. The interface supports one-click question prompts, concise summaries for long papers, and even a podcast-style narration of the document.

The final step is drafting with AI Writer. Users can build an outline using an “outline builder” to avoid the cold-start problem, then use “continue writing with citations” to generate sections that prefer material from the user’s library but can also draw from SciSpace’s broader paper database when needed. A citation workflow is built into writing: if a paragraph needs sources, the system can suggest papers that support it, and references can be reformatted (e.g., switching citation styles) in one click. Drafts can be exported to a document file for sharing or continued editing elsewhere.

For a more automated “one-shot” approach, SciSpace introduces an agent that takes a single statement and produces a systematic literature review plan aligned with PRISMA-style steps: it creates inclusion/exclusion criteria, searches multiple databases (including PubMed and Google Scholar), downloads full texts, deduplicates papers, extracts data, and outputs a full report—demonstrated as taking about 30 minutes for one example statement. The takeaway is a shift from manual literature juggling to a guided pipeline that prioritizes citation-backed accuracy at every stage.