Tools
Tools for scientific literature
The tools we reach for when searching, reading, and making sense of scientific papers — from classic databases to AI research assistants.
Search & Discovery
Databases for finding peer-reviewed papers across every field.
The go-to biomedical database, maintained by the US National Library of Medicine. Over 37M citations from MEDLINE and life-science journals.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.govBroad free search across academic papers, books, patents, and preprints — the widest net you can cast in one query.
scholar.google.comFree AI-enhanced search over 200M+ papers with smart citation context, TLDR summaries, and a rich open API.
semanticscholar.orgOpen-access life-sciences search that indexes PubMed plus preprints (bioRxiv, medRxiv) with full-text search when available.
europepmc.orgAI Research Assistants
LLM-powered tools that search, read, and synthesise the literature for you.
Ask a research question and Elicit finds relevant papers, extracts key findings, and lays them out in a comparison table.
elicit.comAnswers yes/no and "what does the evidence say?" questions by aggregating conclusions across papers.
consensus.appAI copilot that sits next to any paper — explain jargon, math, figures, and methods in plain language as you read.
scispace.comDeep-search agent that iteratively refines its own queries to dig up the most relevant papers, even the obscure ones.
undermind.aiSmart citations that show you whether a paper has been supported, contrasted, or simply mentioned by later work.
scite.aiUpload PDFs and chat with them — Google's AI notebook answers questions grounded only in your uploaded sources.
notebooklm.googleCitation Mapping
Visualise how papers relate so you can branch out from a single seed paper.
Give it one paper and it builds a visual graph of similar papers based on shared citations.
connectedpapers.comCitation network explorer with collections, alerts, and "similar work" recommendations as you build a reading list.
app.researchrabbit.aiInteractive citation maps that update over time so you can track an area of literature as it evolves.
litmaps.comFree citation-graph tool that surfaces the most relevant papers and most-cited authors for a given topic.
inciteful.xyzReference Managers
Organise, annotate, and cite the papers you collect.
Free and open-source. Excellent browser capture, Word/Google Docs plugins, and a healthy plugin ecosystem.
zotero.orgReference manager and PDF reader with cross-device sync, owned by Elsevier.
mendeley.comLong-established commercial reference manager, widely supported by universities and publishers.
endnote.comClean, fast reference manager built for Google Docs with seamless PDF management and one-click import.
paperpile.com