If you need a tool to help you find relevant academic papers and do so as quickly as possible, Semantic Scholar is a top contender. It's a free AI-powered research service with a database of more than 219 million papers across many scientific fields. The service has powerful search filters, brief summaries and tools to cite papers, organize papers into folders and subscribe to AI-powered research feeds. You can also get paper recommendations and automated email alerts for new citations, so it's a good all-purpose tool for researchers.
Another top contender is Elicit, an AI research assistant that helps you find, summarize and extract data from more than 125 million academic papers. It's geared for empirical subjects like biomedicine and machine learning, but can also speed up literature reviews, automate systematic reviews and keep you up to date with new research. Elicit offers several versions to match different needs, including a free Basic version and a subscription-based Plus version.
Consensus is another good option, an AI-powered academic search engine that indexes more than 200 million papers across all fields. It's got proprietary search tools with lots of filtering options and AI insights through its Copilot and Consensus Meter. The service is designed to help students, researchers and professionals speed literature reviews and validate research more quickly, and it's available on several pricing tiers to match different needs.
For those who want a general-purpose tool, OpenRead offers an AI-infused research experience with access to more than 300 million papers. Its tools include Paper Espresso to summarize paper content, Paper Q&A to ask questions about papers and a Related Paper Graph to show connections between papers. OpenRead is designed to help you keep up with the latest research and get more done, and it's available on several pricing tiers to match different users.