Question: I'm looking for a way to quickly understand the main points of academic papers and research reports without having to read them all the way through.

If you want a fast, efficient way to get a handle on what's in academic papers and research reports, Explainpaper could be just the ticket. The AI-powered tool explains complex subjects, lets you upload papers and flag passages you don't understand, and asks followup questions to dig deeper. It also can summarize papers, compare multiple papers and offer different pricing levels depending on your needs.

Another good option is Elicit, an AI research assistant that can rapidly find, summarize and extract data from more than 125 million research papers. It's good for empirical subjects like biomedicine and machine learning. You can have a conversation with the contents of papers, automate systematic reviews, and follow the latest research.

Scholarcy offers an AI-powered summarization tool that turns dense documents into interactive summary flashcards. It can handle lots of file formats and perform summarization, analysis, organization and synthesis tasks. Scholarcy also has more advanced features like highlighting passages, creating literature matrices and generating bibliographies, so it's good for students and researchers.

For a more comprehensive and free service, Semantic Scholar is worth a look. You can search for and read relevant scientific papers in a very large database, with features like brief summaries (TLDRs), searches by journal and author, and the ability to organize papers into folders. It also offers AI-powered research feeds and collaborative sharing, so it's good for researchers and developers.