Literature search, citation mapping and reading tools for students, academics and anyone who has to defend where a claim came from. Several are free for individuals.
Upload your sources and it answers only from them, with a citation on every claim. The audio overview that turns a reading pile into a podcast is a surprisingly good way to review material.
Search that answers in prose and links every source, which makes it faster than a search engine for factual questions. Verify the citations, because it sometimes attaches the wrong one.
Extracts structured data from a set of papers into a comparison table: sample sizes, methods, outcomes. Built for systematic reviews, and it saves days of manual reading.
Ask a yes or no research question and it summarises what the literature actually concludes, with the split between studies. Useful for a quick sanity check before you make a claim.
Free academic search from AI2 with citation context, influential citation counts and a public API. Many other tools in this list are built on top of its data.
Give it one paper and it draws the graph of similar work around it. The fastest way to understand a field you just arrived in.
Builds collections that keep recommending new papers as you add to them, like a playlist for literature. Free, and the alerts are genuinely well tuned.
Citation maps plotted over time, so you can see how an idea propagated. Overlaps with Connected Papers; pick this one if chronology matters to your argument.
Shows whether later papers supported or contradicted a finding rather than just counting citations. The single best defence against quoting a study that was later refuted.
Free citation network explorer that finds the papers connecting two others. Plain interface, no account required, quietly excellent.
Explains a dense paper paragraph by paragraph and answers questions about it. Aimed at students reading outside their field.
The reference manager to standardise on: open source, free, with a browser connector that captures metadata correctly from almost any page. Storage is the only thing you pay for.
Reference management that lives inside Google Docs, which is why collaborative writing teams choose it over Zotero. Cheap, tidy and less flexible.
Where machine learning, physics and maths preprints appear first, often months before publication. Nothing is peer reviewed here, so read accordingly.
Turns a search into a visual map of subtopics and the papers under each. A good first move when you do not yet know the vocabulary of a field.