Consensus vs Inciteful

Consensus is an AI workspace and academic search engine for scientific research, available on web, Android, iOS, and as an extension. It searches more than 220 million peer-reviewed papers, with the database updated weekly, and offers filters for publication date, access, citations, journal rank, study design, population, sample size, and other paper details. Its Research Agent plans multi-step searches, uses tools such as citation crawling and DOI lookup, and returns citation-backed answers. Consensus says citations in its AI summaries correspond to exact paper quotes, with the relevant section identified and PDF text highlighted when available. Medical Mode searches a selected collection of about 8 million papers and 50,000 clinical guidelines from the top 1,000 medical journals. Users can import Zotero libraries and export CSV or RIS files for reference managers. Consensus also works in ChatGPT, Claude, and Microsoft 365 Copilot; API and MCP calls share a monthly allowance. The Free Tier costs nothing. Pro is $20 a month, or $144/year billed annually; Deep is $65 a month, or $540/year billed annually.

Inciteful is a free web tool that helps researchers discover academic literature through citation networks. Paper Discovery builds a network around selected papers and surfaces important and similar papers, along with authors and institutions. Results can be filtered by keyword, distance, and year. Literature Connector maps citation paths between two papers in an interactive visualization, supporting interdisciplinary work and entry into unfamiliar research areas. Inciteful says its database covers more than 240 million academic papers and indexes more than 2 billion citations, using sources including OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Crossref, and OpenCitations. Researchers can import BibTeX files to seed a graph, provided entries include DOIs, then export results in BibTeX format or to Zotero, Mendeley, or another reference manager. Core tools are free with no stated usage limits. The maker says the codebase is fully open source. Graph Pruning is beta and may not remain supported or become permanent.