Question: Are there any tools that can help me summarize and paraphrase academic papers in plain English?

SciSpace is a useful tool that can help you get more out of literature reviews by letting you interact with scientific PDFs. It can paraphrase text, generate citations, and write literature reviews. You can upload your own PDFs or tap into more than 200 million research papers and get explanations and summaries of academic papers at a higher level. It's geared for researchers, students and professionals who want to speed up literature reviews and get better results from academic research.

Another option is Enago Read, an AI-powered research assistant designed to help researchers get to their research faster by finding, reading and understanding research papers. It comes with a Summary Generation tool for quick summaries, Collaborative Tools for sharing and annotating literature, and a Copilot Feature for explanations of technical terms. The service offers a free Basic plan, Premium plans and Institutional Plans so you can find one that suits your needs.

If you want a service that improves language and grammar but keeps the tone formal, Paperpal is worth a look. It suggests language based on context, checks grammar as you type and paraphrases text to make it clear. Paperpal also offers high-quality academic translations and is used by major publishers and authors around the world.

Last is SciSummary, which uses large language models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to generate detailed summaries of scientific papers. You can upload documents, links or PDFs and get summaries by email in a few minutes. The service is designed to help you get more out of research and work more efficiently, and offers free and premium options.