A Practical Guide to Using AI Tools for Literature Searches

AI tools are showing up everywhere in medicine right now — in our inboxes, in meetings, and quietly in the background as we prepare talks or look up unfamiliar territory. Many of us are experimenting with them in real time, often between consults or after a busy clinic day, trying to figure out what they’re actually good at and how to use them without creating extra work.

One place where AI can be genuinely helpful is in orienting yourself to a clinical question — especially when you need a quick overview before diving deeper. Over the past year, I’ve found that pairing AI tools with traditional verification steps has made my own literature searches faster and more organized, while still keeping the process grounded in real evidence. Since many colleagues are exploring these tools too, I thought I’d share the simple workflow I’ve settled into. Nothing here is prescriptive; it’s just what I’ve found useful as a clinician who wants speed and reliability.

What AI Can Do Well (and Why It’s Helpful)

AI can be a surprisingly helpful companion when you’re approaching a clinical topic. It can:

• Summarize large volumes of text quickly

• Highlight themes or connections across papers

• Provide a starting point when you’re approaching a topic you haven’t revisited in a while

• Help double-check that you’re not missing obvious papers

• Turn unstructured information into something more organized

  
  

AI isn’t a replacement for reading source papers, but it can make it easier to start with some structure already in place.

My Three-Step Workflow

1. Start With OpenEvidence

OpenEvidence has become my go-to for initial orientation. It’s built specifically for medical literature and has content agreements with NEJM and JAMA, which helps anchor it in reputable sources. What I appreciate most is that every statement comes with a citation, and you can click directly into the underlying study.

Two very practical notes:

• It’s free for medical professionals, which makes it easy to recommend.

• There’s also a mobile app, which is surprisingly handy when you’re on service and need to look something up between cases.

  
  

For me, OpenEvidence gives a quick landscape of what has been studied, what hasn’t, and where the evidence feels solid versus sparse.

Website: https://www.openevidence.com/

2. Cross-Check and Structure With Elicit

I don’t use Elicit for every question, but I often reach for it when I’m working on publications, talks, or anything where I need to be comprehensive.

Elicit is trained on a broader scientific corpus, which means it sometimes pulls in studies that OpenEvidence misses or adds contextual pieces that help round out the picture. Its real strengths are:

• generating tables from search results

• extracting sample sizes and primary outcomes

• grouping related studies

• summarizing PDFs you upload

  
  

If OpenEvidence helps me understand the landscape, Elicit helps me organize and structure that landscape — especially when multiple study designs or subtopics are in play.

Website: https://elicit.com/

3. Verify With a DOI Check (My Favorite 10-Second Step)

Once I’ve identified the key papers, I take the DOI or PubMed ID and paste it directly into Mendeley, which will automatically fetch the citation metadata and abstract.

A few reasons I rely on this step:

• It confirms the paper exists

• The metadata is correct

• The journal, year, and authors match

• The abstract aligns with the AI summary

  
  

Not all reference managers can fetch metadata from just a DOI or PubMed ID — but Mendeley can, and Mendeley is free, which makes it a great option if you need an accessible verification tool.

This small step has saved me more than once from citing a misattributed or nonexistent paper.

A Gentle Note on Limitations

AI tools are still evolving, and so are we. They can miss studies, overstate certainty, or conflate adjacent concepts. That’s not a failure — just a reminder that they’re best used alongside our clinical judgment and our usual habits of checking primary sources.

For me, the workflow above keeps things balanced: AI helps with speed and structure, and the DOI check keeps everything grounded in reality.

When This Workflow Helps Most

I reach for this system when:

• Preparing for a meeting or protocol discussion

• Refreshing a topic I haven’t touched in a while

• Getting oriented before reading more deeply

• Drafting a talk, manuscript, or background section

• Checking whether references actually exist before citing them

  
  

This workflow is flexible: I use it for everything from quick orientation to deeper literature reviews. The steps stay the same; the depth just changes depending on the question. This has become my primary approach to reviewing the literature -- it fuses speed with reliability in a way that fits how we practice today. I still use PubMed when I need to dive deeper into a particular thread, but the core workflow starts here.

Closing Thoughts

AI is becoming part of everyday clinical practice, and most of us are learning as we go. My hope is that sharing this workflow helps demystify the process a bit and gives you a reliable and practical starting point if you’re exploring these tools yourself.

If you’ve found other strategies or tools that work well for you, I’d genuinely love to hear them — we’re all figuring this out together.