› For your PhD dissertation, don’t choose one AI tool for everything.
› Build a toolkit: use Semantic Scholar or Elicit to find research, Zotero to manage references, NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook) to work with your own PDFs, and a general-purpose language model such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude to help with code and editing your own writing.
› Each tool has a specific job, and you need to know how to check its results.This article is part of our AI in education series.
› Information and prices are current as of October 12, 2026.