Explainpaper

The defining feature is the highlight. Select a phrase, get a plain-language explanation, stay in the document. The result stays aware of the surrounding context, so it explains what the sentence means in this paper, not what the words mean in isolation. For a paper that quietly redefines a common term, that distinction matters.

Explanations come at more than one level. Beginner framing when the concept is new. Expert framing when you want the technical version. This single control makes the tool usable across a whole reading session: the same paragraph can be explained differently at the start and at the end.

Beyond highlighting, you can ask the paper questions. Explainpaper answers from the document itself, which cuts down on the confident-but-wrong answers you get when you paste an excerpt into a general chatbot. You can ask for a summary of the results, for the paper's main argument, or for the passage that supports a specific claim. Paid plans add the ability to jump to the relevant section.

Rather than reading front to back, you can have Explainpaper surface the structure first. Outlines, key points, and a map of how the concepts connect. It's a way to decide whether a paper deserves a close read, or to orient yourself before one.

Math Explain, a Pro feature, handles formulas and figures. Highlight an equation and ask what each term does, or what the authors are claiming by writing it that way. Dense notation is one of the most common walls in technical papers, and this targets it directly.

Pro also generates summaries for the whole paper. Where the insights map structure, the summary compresses findings. It's useful when you need to know what a paper concludes before deciding if it's worth the time.

On Pro, your highlights and explanations persist. You can return to a paper weeks later and see what you flagged and what the tool told you. Explanations also come in 50+ languages, so you can read a paper in English and receive the explanations in your native language.

If you already organize references in Zotero, Explainpaper can import that library. You skip the download-and-upload dance and open papers directly from the place you already keep them.