Overview
Consensus is an AI-powered academic search engine for finding, understanding and comparing scientific research. It first retrieves studies relevant to your question, then uses the results to produce cited summaries. You can return to the papers and check the evidence behind each answer.
It is useful for students, researchers and professionals who need references or an introduction to the literature on a topic. You can search by question, keywords, title, author or DOI. Filters help narrow the scope, while the library brings together saved papers and uploaded documents for further analysis.
Its focus on scientific literature makes it useful for research questions. The database also includes preprints, which you can exclude using filters. Coverage is incomplete, full-text access depends on availability, and AI can misinterpret a study. Use summaries to guide your reading and check the methods, study population and conclusions before citing a paper or making a decision.
Features and functionality
- Academic search using natural-language questions, terms, authors, titles and DOIs.
- Filters for publication date, open access, study design, population, sample size and other criteria.
- Cited summaries and side-by-side study comparisons in tables, including methods and findings.
- Deep Review to explore complex questions through multiple searches and a more extensive analysis of the literature.
- Consensus Meter to show agreement and disagreement among the studies returned for yes-or-no questions. The indicator represents that set of results, rather than all the research on the topic.
- My Library to organise papers into collections, import references and analyse documents. Citation Graph helps explore connections between papers through their citations.
Use cases
- Find references for an academic assignment and build an initial reading list.
- Compare research on an intervention, separating findings by population or method.
- Explore areas of agreement, disagreement and potential gaps before defining a research question.
- Return to papers in a collection and ask questions about their methods or findings.
For a systematic review, the tool can support discovery and initial screening. Study selection, inclusion criteria and quality assessment still require a separate procedure.
How to use
- Open Consensus and ask a specific research question. Include the population, intervention or context when those details matter.
- Adjust the filters to match your scope. Exclude preprints if your work requires studies that have already been peer-reviewed.
- Read the results and open the citations in the summary. Check whether the conclusions apply to your question and whether the analysis used the abstract or full text.
- Save relevant papers to a collection or export the references to continue reading and writing.
- Use an in-depth analysis when you need to compare more aspects of a topic, and check your plan's limits.
Required experience level
Searching with questions makes it easier to get started, but interpreting scientific evidence requires intermediate knowledge. Terms such as systematic review, controlled trial and observational study affect how results should be read. Beginners can use the tool to find papers and learn to distinguish these methods.
Integrations
Consensus works on the web and offers an API for adding academic search to applications and workflows. Its MCP server connects research to compatible assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude. API and MCP usage share the account's allowance, and the availability of full-text excerpts depends on the plan and the paper.
You can import your Zotero library and export references in formats such as RIS and CSV for reference managers. Zotero import is one-way and must be repeated to bring in new items. It does not keep the two services automatically in sync.
Plans and access
Free access lets you search for papers and try analyses within usage allowances. Subscriptions expand access to AI features, in-depth analyses and integrations. Plans for teams and institutions include account management and billing options.
Check the pricing page before subscribing. Analysis and API/MCP allowances vary by plan. Access to Consensus does not guarantee free access to every paper found, as some full texts depend on open access, publisher partnerships or institutional subscriptions.
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