Consensus is an AI-powered academic search engine that finds and synthesizes evidence from peer-reviewed scientific papers. Instead of returning a list of papers, it reads the studies and provides direct answers to your research questions, backed by citations to the specific papers that support each claim. The Consensus Meter feature aggregates findings across multiple studies to show the scientific consensus on a question - what percentage of studies support a claim, with what level of evidence. This is invaluable for researchers, clinicians, and policy makers who need to understand the balance of evidence rather than cherry-picking individual studies. Consensus searches across over 200 million scientific papers from Semantic Scholar's database. It's particularly strong in health, nutrition, psychology, economics, and social sciences. The AI extracts key findings from abstracts and full texts, making it dramatically faster to survey a field than manual literature review.

What the community says

Consensus has become a staple of academic Reddit communities, with r/PhD, r/GradSchool, and r/academia users describing it as an 'instant second-opinion machine' for validating research claims with peer-reviewed citations. Its AI searches exclusively through academic literature - over 200 million papers - which community members praise as superior to tools that hallucinate non-existent sources. Limitations noted include a restricted free tier that researchers hit quickly, and some accuracy concerns when queries are unconventional or highly domain-specific. The March 2026 launch of an API for paper search has generated excitement among developers and research engineers. Based on community discussions from Reddit, academic library guides, and research tool reviews over the past 12 months.