Consensus

Every response starts with retrieval, not generation. Consensus scans its corpus using semantic search and keyword matching, picks the most relevant papers, and only then writes a summary that cites each source. That means you can trace any sentence back to the study it came from. It's the main reason people pick this over a general AI chatbot.

Ask a yes/no question. The Meter shows the split of scientific opinion, backed by an overview of the papers on each side. The Snapshot view goes further and reports four quality indicators for each position: how recent the papers are, how many are meta-analyses, systematic reviews, or randomized controlled trials, the average journal rank, and citation counts. It's a blunt instrument. A one-paper position still looks like a position. Still beats guessing.

Pro Search is the everyday literature review tool: it answers questions with citations in a conversational format. Deep Review takes longer. It produces a full literature review across a larger set of studies, which you want when you need the state of a field rather than a single answer. Think hours of reading, compressed. Plan tiers are largely defined by how many Deep reviews you get: 3 on Free, 15 on Pro, 200 on Deep, and 50 per user on Teams.

Ask Paper turns one study into a conversation. Instead of skimming a 20-page PDF for the sample size or the measurement method, you open the paper and ask. Done. It saves the most time on a narrow question, and it behaves least like a search engine.

Study Snapshots pull out key findings and the methods behind them so the results list is scannable. The Citation Graph shows how papers relate to one another. That helps when you're hunting the foundational work behind a recent result. Collections hold papers you want to keep, and everything exports to RIS, BibTeX, or CSV.

Filters cover publication date, study type, sample size, journal quartile, citation count, academic field, country, and open-access status. You can also ask comparative questions ("carbon taxes vs cap-and-trade") or request a format like a pros-and-cons list. Filtering for human randomized controlled trials is the difference between a useful answer and a pile of animal studies.

The Consensus API is a single REST endpoint. It returns ranked papers with titles, authors, journals, publication years, citation counts, and links, and it supports the same filters as the web app. It shares a monthly call pool with MCP usage. That pool is 30 calls on Free, 500 on Pro, 2,000 on Deep. Extra calls cost $0.05 each for paid users. Not free, but cheap. API keys are self-serve from your account dashboard.