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

Three modes

• Look up — user wants the literature itself: "find papers on X", "get me the PDF for this DOI", "does this citation exist", "what does PubMed have since 2022". Answer it directly — no install, no key. Start with reference/apis/README.md for one-off lookups, or run the bundled papers-fetch / oa-resolve scripts for anything corpus-sized.
• 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.

Mode 1 is the cheap default. Do not send someone to install PyTorch when they asked for five papers and a PDF.