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Side-by-side features, use cases and pricing — because the right pick depends on your job and budget, not just the ranking.
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Semantic Scholar
✓ verifiedFree
Free AI-powered academic search engine indexing 236M+ papers, for researchers wanting semantic literature discovery and an augmented reader.
7.9M visits/mo13K saves
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Elicit
✓ verifiedFreemium
Well-adopted AI research assistant for finding papers, summarizing, and extracting data at scale.
2.1M visits/mo
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ThesisAI
✓ verifiedPaid
AI research workspace that drafts full academic papers with verified inline citations from up to 500 uploaded sources in a single prompt.
189K visits/mo32K saves
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Open Knowledge Maps
✓ verifiedFree
Free nonprofit tool that visualizes scientific literature as topic maps, clustering papers to speed research discovery.
113K visits/mo1.1K saves
Pricing
No public pricing
Basic: Free
Plus: $10 per month, billed annually
Pro: $42 per month, billed annually
Team: $65 per user, per month billed annually
Enterprise: Custom
Per document: from $4
No public pricing
No public pricing
Core features
- ✦AI-powered semantic search across 236M+ papers
- ✦Semantic Reader for augmented, contextual paper reading
- ✦Free public API for paper search and metadata
- ✦Author and topic discovery
- ✦Citation graph exploration
- ✦Beta program for new features
- ✦AI-enabled systematic reviews
- ✦Research reports
- ✦Upload your own PDFs
- ✦Quick summaries
- ✦Source quotes
- ✦Question answering
- ✦Full document drafting from one prompt
- ✦Automated literature search via Semantic Scholar
- ✦Import and cite up to 500 uploaded papers
- ✦Inline citation verification
- ✦Export to PDF, Word, LaTeX, and BibTeX
- ✦Overleaf integration for manual editing
- ✦Zotero and Mendeley library import
- ✦AI-generated visual maps of research topics
- ✦Clusters papers into themes
- ✦Open-access resource discovery
- ✦Open-source and nonprofit
- ✦Custom integrations/embedding for organizations
- ✦Research on AI governance
- ✦Analysis of AI risks and opportunities
- ✦Annual reports and updates
- ✦Information on AI regulation
- ✦Event summaries and announcements
Use cases
- →Researchers searching scientific literature across disciplines
- →Developers building applications on top of scholarly data via the API
- →Students exploring citation networks for a topic
- →Librarians and academics needing free literature discovery tools
- →Speeding up literature reviews
- →Automating systematic reviews and meta-analyses
- →Learning about new domains
- →Data extraction in rigorous systematic literature reviews
- →Researchers producing a literature review quickly
- →Students drafting long papers with verified citations
- →Academics writing in a non-native language
- →Exporting AI-drafted content into LaTeX workflows
- →Get an overview of a research field
- →Find relevant papers faster
- →Identify key concepts in the literature
- →Embed discovery tools in library systems
- →Understanding public attitudes towards AI
- →Analyzing the impact of AI on great powers
- →Regulating downstream AI developers
- →Managing risks from AI-enabled biological tools
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