Literature Review Tools — Select & Run

A curated, use-case-organized catalog of the strongest open-source AI tools for literature review — plus a launcher that actually installs and runs the top ones. Covers: end-to-end research agents, deep-research / auto-survey generators, autonomous "idea→paper" systems, citation-backed RAG over PDFs, PRISMA screening, MCP servers, Zotero/Obsidian integrations, PDF→structured extraction, citation graphs, and paper-writing / peer-review assistants.

Full source of truth (README, always current star counts): https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools

Two modes

• Recommend — user asks "what should I use to …". Route with the tables below; cite the catalog for details.
• Run — user asks to install / run / use a specific tool ("turn this PDF into Markdown with MinerU", "ask PaperQA2 about these papers", "set up the arXiv MCP server"). Drive scripts/litrun.py via Bash — do not hand the user raw pip commands to copy.

Run mode — how to drive scripts/litrun.py