Most AI research tools find sources and summarise them. These help with what comes after: questioning a source, mapping a debate, and checking whether your evidence really carries your argument. They're free, and your work never leaves your browser.
See the toolsWho made thisEach one takes a problem historians know well and gives it structure. Use them on their own, or together as a project grows from reading to writing.
"I've read the scholarship, but I can't hold the whole debate in my head."
Place each work on a timeline in the lane of the position it argues for, then draw who challenges, builds on, refines or synthesises whom. It turns the map into a chronological outline and points out the gaps: quiet decades, isolated works, positions resting on a single author.
"I'm quoting this document, but have I really questioned it?"
Work through the questions a historian puts to a primary source: who made it and why, for whom, what it leaves out, how close its author was to events, and what confirms or contradicts it. Across your library, it shows whose voices your evidence captures and whose it misses.
"Does my evidence actually support what I'm claiming?"
Break your argument into claims and attach each quotation or data point, with its page reference and whether you've checked it against the original. It flags claims resting on one source, and builds a list, grouped by archive and page, of everything you still need to verify.
A few principles run through all of them.
Everything you enter is saved in your own browser. Nothing is uploaded, and there are no accounts. Download a backup whenever you like.
Every tool can turn your work into a prompt for whichever AI assistant you use. The prompts ask it to question you, not to think for you, and never to invent references.
No tracking, no paywall, no newsletter pop-ups. The tools are kept running by the people who find them useful.
I'm Nick Schapowal, a historian trained in Sydney. My Honours degree at Macquarie University was in Ancient History and Politics, focused on Roman history: the Hellenistic world, the Imperial period, Late Antiquity and Byzantium.
I went on to a Master of Arts in History at the University of Sydney, specialising in Holocaust and genocide studies and the history of human rights. My thesis compared the typology of antisemitism in the medieval period with that of the Holocaust. Along the way I also studied Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon.
Comparative work like that means holding several historiographies side by side, reading very different kinds of sources critically, and keeping careful track of which claims rest on which evidence. That's the work these tools are built to support.
Alongside history, I've trained in education and technology, with a Graduate Certificate in eLearning from the University of New England, a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment, and study in artificial intelligence, responsible AI and data analytics. niftyresearch.tools is where those threads meet: tools that put AI to work for researchers without handing over the historian's judgement.
niftyresearch.tools is free and always will be. I build and maintain it in my spare time, and pay for the hosting and domain myself.
If a tool has saved you an afternoon in the archive or helped a chapter come together, you can buy me a coffee. It keeps the site online and helps pay for building the next tool.