Consensus

Consensus Key Insights

What is Consensus?

Consensus is an AI-powered academic search engine built on a database of over 250 million peer-reviewed research papers. Unlike general AI chatbots, every answer Consensus generates is tied directly to real, citable scientific studies, meaning there is no hallucination of sources.

Researchers, clinicians, analysts, and students use it to run literature reviews, validate claims, and synthesise evidence across entire bodies of research at a fraction of the time a manual review would take.

It does this through a proprietary three-stage search process, AI-generated summaries, a unique Consensus Meter for yes/no research questions, and a Copilot assistant that executes multi-step research tasks. For any professional who needs fast, credible, science-backed answers, Consensus is a genuine research productivity tool.

Key Features of Consensus

Consensus Meter for Evidence-Based Decisions

The Consensus Meter is the tool's signature capability. When you ask a yes/no question such as “Does intermittent fasting reduce body weight?” it analyses the top papers and generates a visual indicator of how strongly the scientific literature agrees or disagrees. This removes hours of manual synthesis and gives decision-makers a clear, defensible answer fast.

Deep Search with Study Quality Indicators

Deep Search goes beyond standard retrieval by pulling from up to 50 papers per query rather than the standard 20. It layers in research quality indicators such as RCT flags, sample size, and journal credibility so you can prioritise high-quality evidence immediately rather than screening dozens of abstracts manually.

Ask Paper (Chat with Your PDF)

Ask Paper lets you open any full-text paper within Consensus and interrogate it directly. You can ask about the methodology, specific charts, or statistical outputs, and receive precise, contextual answers pulled straight from that document. This is critical for researchers who need to verify the exact claim within a study rather than relying on an AI summary alone.

Reference Export and Research Manager Integration

Consensus supports export to RIS, BibTeX, and CSV formats, enabling direct import into Endnote, Mendeley, and Zotero. Combined with custom saved lists and full search history, it functions as a lightweight research workspace, removing the friction of copying and pasting citations between tools.

Multilingual Research in 31 AI-Analysed Languages

Consensus supports searches in over 100 languages and delivers AI summaries and Copilot responses in 31 languages. For international research teams or non-English literature reviews, this is a meaningful operational advantage that most competing tools do not yet match.

Consensus Pricing Plans

Consensus Copilot: Your AI Research Assistant

Consensus Copilot is the AI layer that sits above raw search results. It accepts direct commands and returns formatted research outputs grounded in real papers. You can ask it to compare findings across studies, write a structured evidence summary, or identify conflicting data points within a topic.

For researchers who run multiple literature reviews per week, Copilot cuts the time spent on synthesis from hours down to minutes while keeping every output traceable to its source paper.

Who Gets the Most Out of Consensus

Consensus is best suited to researchers, clinicians, science journalists, policy analysts, and graduate students who need to query the academic literature regularly. It is particularly powerful in health, medicine, and social science where yes/no research questions are common and evidence synthesis directly drives decisions.

Marketing teams and content strategists working on science-backed content also benefit from its ability to pull verified claims quickly. It is less suited to pure keyword-based discovery tasks where a tool like Elicit or Google Scholar gives broader raw coverage.

Pros and Cons

Consensus Teams: Collaborative Research at Scale

The Consensus Teams plan supports groups from 2 to 200 members, with centralised billing, individual logins, and admin account management. Each user on a Teams plan receives 50 Deep Searches per month along with all Pro features.

Bulk discounts scale as your organisation grows, and an Enterprise tier handles universities, institutes, and organisations with over 200 users including library integrations and product training sessions. For research labs or corporate intelligence teams, this removes the overhead of managing individual subscriptions.

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