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Research AI apps

Platforms for deep research and literature work — AI that reads, cites, and synthesizes sources.

10 apps · researched & kept current by Claude Code

Filter & search these 10 apps
  • View Scite details
    ResearchFREEMIUM

    Scite

    Scite (a Research Solutions company)

    AI research assistant built on citation-context Smart Citations.

    Scite helps researchers find and evaluate scientific literature using Smart Citations — citations classified by whether they support, contrast, or simply mention a paper's claims. Beyond search, its AI Assistant answers research questions with grounded, cited references, and reliability dashboards flag retracted or heavily disputed work. Available on the web and via browser and reference-manager plugins.

    Worth knowing

    Acquired by Nasdaq-listed Research Solutions in November 2023; founder Josh Nicholson became its chief strategy officer.

    • research
    • citations
    • academic-search
    • literature-review
  • View Undermind details
    ResearchFREEMIUM

    Undermind

    Undermind

    AI deep-research agent that finds every relevant paper on a scientific question.

    A research-discovery platform that takes a natural-language question and autonomously searches, reads, and evaluates hundreds of academic papers — following citation trails and explaining each result's relevance, mimicking how an expert runs a literature review. Built by MIT quantum-physics PhDs and backed by Y Combinator; used by researchers at MIT, Harvard, and Caltech.

    Worth knowing

    Founded by two MIT quantum-physics PhDs (YC S24); co-founder Tom Hartke’s thesis was a top-4 APS atomic-physics thesis of 2022.

    • research
    • literature-search
    • science
    • deep-research
  • View Elicit details
    ResearchFREEMIUM

    Elicit

    Elicit (formerly Ought)

    AI research assistant for literature review and evidence synthesis.

    Searches, summarizes, and extracts structured data across 125M+ academic papers, with sentence-level citations. Goes beyond chat-over-papers with a guided systematic-review workflow covering search, screening, extraction, and report synthesis. A free Basic plan offers unlimited search and summaries; paid tiers add data-extraction volume and the review pipeline.

    Worth knowing

    Spun out of Ought, a nonprofit AI-reasoning research lab, into an independent public-benefit corp in 2023.

    • research
    • literature-review
    • systematic-review
    • citations
  • View Consensus details
    ResearchFREEMIUM

    Consensus

    Consensus

    AI search over 200M+ peer-reviewed papers, with citations.

    An academic search engine that runs natural-language questions against a corpus of more than 200 million peer-reviewed papers and synthesizes the findings with inline citations. Its Consensus Meter aggregates how much the studies agree or disagree, and a copilot helps draft literature reviews. Aimed at researchers, students, and clinicians.

    Worth knowing

    Founded 2021 by two Northwestern D1-athlete teammates; raised an $11.5M Series A in 2024.

    • research
    • academic-search
    • citations
    • literature-review
  • View SciSpace details
    ResearchFREEMIUM

    SciSpace

    SciSpace

    AI research assistant: search, read, and review the literature.

    AI workspace for academics that searches a corpus of 280M+ papers, runs literature reviews, and answers questions over PDFs with citations. Adds writing aids like a paraphraser and citation generator. Formerly Typeset.io; introduced agentic 'Deep Review' literature search in 2025. Free Basic tier with paid upgrades.

    Worth knowing

    Formerly Typeset.io; pairs a 280M-paper index with agentic 'Deep Review' literature search added in 2025.

    • research
    • literature-review
    • papers
    • citations
    • +1
  • View NotebookLM details
    ResearchFREEMIUM

    NotebookLM

    Google

    Grounded research notebook — chat your sources, get Audio Overviews.

    Google's source-grounded research tool — upload docs, PDFs, and links, then ask questions answered only from your material, with citations and shareable Audio Overviews. Powered by Gemini.

    Worth knowing

    Debuted as 'Project Tailwind' at Google I/O 2023, co-created by bestselling science author Steven Johnson.

    • research
    • rag
    • citations
    • audio-overview
  • View Google AI Studio details
    ResearchFREE

    Google AI Studio

    Google

    Prototype with Gemini — prompts, multimodal, and instant API keys.

    Google's free playground for building with Gemini — prompt design, multimodal input, structured output, and one-click export to API code. The fastest way to start building on Gemini.

    Worth knowing

    Launched in December 2023 as the successor to MakerSuite, rebranded when Google moved from PaLM to Gemini.

    • prototyping
    • gemini
    • api
    • playground
  • View Khoj details
    ResearchFREEMIUMOpen core

    Khoj

    Khoj AI

    Open-source AI second brain that chats with your docs and the web, local or hosted.

    An open-source "AI second brain" for chatting with local or online models, searching across your personal documents and the internet, building custom agents, and automating research. Self-host it on your own machine, or use plugins for Obsidian, Emacs, desktop, and mobile. Licensed AGPL-3.0; a paid managed cloud tier also exists, so it's freemium.

    Worth knowing

    Built by two ex-Microsoft engineers; went through Y Combinator (S23).

    • second-brain
    • rag
    • self-hosted
    • open-source
    • +1
  • View GPT Researcher details
    ResearchBYO KEYOSS

    GPT Researcher

    Assaf Elovic / Tavily

    Autonomous AI agent that runs deep multi-source web research and writes cited reports.

    An open-source autonomous research agent that plans a task, runs parallel multi-source web searches, validates sources, and synthesizes a cited report. It runs locally as a Python package, FastAPI server, or MCP server, and works with any LLM provider plus a search/retriever backend. Free and Apache-2.0 licensed — you only pay your own LLM and search-API costs.

    Worth knowing

    The open-source project that spawned Tavily, the AI search startup co-founded by its creator Assaf Elovic.

    • open-source
    • self-hosted
    • research
    • agent
    • +1
  • View Hugging Face details
    ResearchFREEMIUM

    Hugging Face

    Hugging Face

    Models, datasets, papers, spaces. The AI research commons.

    Source-of-truth for open-weights models and datasets. Daily-paper feed for tracking research; Spaces for trying ideas without setting up infra. The default home for any model not behind a paid API.

    Worth knowing

    Hit a $4.5B valuation in 2023 — its $235M round drew rival chipmakers and clouds: Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, Salesforce.

    • models
    • datasets
    • papers
    • open-source