Tools for scientific literature

The go-to biomedical database, maintained by the US National Library of Medicine. Over 37M citations from MEDLINE and life-science journals.

Broad free search across academic papers, books, patents, and preprints — the widest net you can cast in one query.

Free AI-enhanced search over 200M+ papers with smart citation context, TLDR summaries, and a rich open API.

Open-access life-sciences search that indexes PubMed plus preprints (bioRxiv, medRxiv) with full-text search when available.

Ask a research question and Elicit finds relevant papers, extracts key findings, and lays them out in a comparison table.

Answers yes/no and "what does the evidence say?" questions by aggregating conclusions across papers.

AI copilot that sits next to any paper — explain jargon, math, figures, and methods in plain language as you read.

Deep-search agent that iteratively refines its own queries to dig up the most relevant papers, even the obscure ones.

Smart citations that show you whether a paper has been supported, contrasted, or simply mentioned by later work.

Upload PDFs and chat with them — Google's AI notebook answers questions grounded only in your uploaded sources.

Give it one paper and it builds a visual graph of similar papers based on shared citations.

Citation network explorer with collections, alerts, and "similar work" recommendations as you build a reading list.

Interactive citation maps that update over time so you can track an area of literature as it evolves.

Free citation-graph tool that surfaces the most relevant papers and most-cited authors for a given topic.

Free and open-source. Excellent browser capture, Word/Google Docs plugins, and a healthy plugin ecosystem.

Reference manager and PDF reader with cross-device sync, owned by Elsevier.

Long-established commercial reference manager, widely supported by universities and publishers.

Clean, fast reference manager built for Google Docs with seamless PDF management and one-click import.