Overview
Consensus is an AI academic search engine that focuses on extracting answers from peer-reviewed scientific papers. Unlike Perplexity, which searches the internet, Consensus only searches academic paper databases (covering over 200 million papers), ensuring that every piece of information is supported by academic sources. It allows users to ask questions in natural language, with AI automatically retrieving relevant papers, extracting key findings, and synthesizing conclusions from multiple papers—while also indicating the number of supporting/opposing papers and citation sources.
Key Features
- Academic Paper Search: AI search based on over 200 million peer-reviewed papers, with each result having an academic source
- Consensus Meter: Visual display of the academic consensus on a given question (proportion of supporting/opposing/uncertain papers)
- AI Synthesis Summary: Synthesizes conclusions from multiple papers into a summary, saving time from reading each paper individually
- Source Citation: Each piece of information is annotated with the source paper, with one-click access to the original text
- GPT-5.5 Enhancement: Pro version is powered by GPT-5.5, offering deeper paper analysis and Q&A
- Multi-Domain Coverage: Covers various disciplines including medicine, psychology, economics, and environmental science
Use Cases
- Literature search and review for academic researchers
- Clinical evidence queries for medical professionals
- Paper writing and reference finding for students
- Fact-checking for journalists and content creators
- Evidence-based research for policy researchers
Pros
- High academic credibility: only searches peer-reviewed papers, ensuring information quality
- Unique Consensus Meter: visually displays academic consensus
- Saves literature search time: AI automatically summarizes key findings
- Useful free version: limited free searches per month
- Clean interface: easier to use than Google Scholar
Pricing
Consensus free version offers limited monthly searches and basic AI summaries. Premium is $8.99/month or $100/year (unlimited searches, GPT-5.5 enhanced summaries, deeper analysis). Student discount available. Enterprise pricing is available upon request.
Summary
Consensus is an 'AI tool' for academic researchers—when you need to know 'what the scientific community thinks about a certain issue,' it is more direct and efficient than Google Scholar. The Consensus Meter feature is especially useful for quickly understanding research consensus when writing reviews. Recommended for anyone doing academic research as a supplementary tool to Google Scholar.