Consensus

Consensus is an AI search engine for finding answers in academic papers. It searches only peer-reviewed literature, listing studies that support or contradict a claim along with an overview of how much agreement there is. Handy for checking whether health, education or management claims have research behind them.

What separates it from general AI search is the source pool. Tools like Perplexity cite news, blogs and forums; Consensus looks only at scholarly literature, and every conclusion maps to a specific paper. For questions where the internet is full of competing opinions — does coffee affect sleep, does remote work reduce productivity — it quickly shows which way the research roughly leans.

Coverage is mostly English-language; Chinese research is sparse. It gives you a map of the literature — you still need to read the papers.

Key features

• Paper search: ask in natural language and get relevant studies from the academic literature rather than web pages.
• Consensus overview: for yes/no questions, it summarises how many relevant studies support, oppose or are mixed on the claim.
• Study summaries: key findings are extracted for each paper, saving you from reading abstracts one by one.
• Filters: narrow by publication year, study type and similar criteria to prioritise stronger study designs.
• Links to papers: every result includes the paper’s details and a link for further reading and citation.

How to use

1. Sign up on the official site; the free tier is enough to try it out.
2. Ask a specific question in English, phrased so that research could answer it.
3. Review the consensus overview and the list of papers, using filters to focus on higher-quality studies.
4. Pick out the key papers and read their methods and conclusions before citing them.

Best for

• Checking popular claims about health, nutrition, education or management against research.
• A first survey of the literature before writing a paper.
• Writers and creators fact-checking claims with academic backing.
• Finding evidence before a decision, when you want to know whether a practice has been shown to work.

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

• Sources are limited to academic literature, which makes it more trustworthy than general search.
• The consensus overview makes the overall direction of the research easy to see.
• Practical filters help separate stronger studies from weaker ones.

Limitations

• Mostly English literature with little Chinese research, and questions asked in Chinese work less well.
• The consensus figure is a rough count of papers, not a rigorous systematic review or meta-analysis.
• Best for empirical questions; it helps little with theoretical or humanities topics.
• It gives you a map of the literature — you still need to read the papers.