Table of Contents
- Consensus vs AnswerThis: The Ultimate Research Assistant?
- Consensus and AnswerThis Comparison
- What is AnswerThis?
- What is Consensus?
- Primary Functions of AnswerThis
- Literature review
- Citation Assistance
- Citation and Paper Management
- Writing Assistance
- PDF Analysis and Breakdown
- Primary Functions of Consensus
- Research Queries
- Consensus Meter
- Citation Assistance
- Ask Paper
- Feature Comparison
- Key Differences
- Recommendation
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Consensus vs AnswerThis: The Ultimate Research Assistant?
Consensus and AnswerThis Comparison
There are many popular tools used for research, but some stand out more than others, and all of them share many features. For many, deciding on a research assistant requires its own research - an inefficient waste of valuable time, and one that negates the whole purpose of the assistant. Hence, we aim to streamline this process by providing a comprehensive, easy to understand analysis of these programs.
This article focuses on AnswerThis and Consensus, two popular AI-driven research assistants designed to simplify and enhance the academic research process. Both platforms leverage artificial intelligence to help researchers locate relevant academic papers, synthesize findings, and assist in writing literature reviews. However, they serve varying purposes and have unique capabilities tailored to distinct needs.
What is AnswerThis?
AnswerThis is a sophisticated AI-powered research assistant designed to facilitate every aspect of the research process. It provides structured, citation-backed answers to complex research questions, drawing from a vast database of over 250 million scholarly articles. AnswerThis excels in literature review generation, citation management, and comprehensive research project support.
Key features include:
- Literature reviews with structured, paragraph-by-paragraph citations.
- A citation map to visualize research relationships.
- Advanced filtering by research quality, domain, or publication recency.
- AI-powered writing assistance, including summarization, paraphrasing, and research question generation.
- The ability to chat with PDFs for deeper comprehension of academic papers.
- Full project management capabilities, allowing researchers to organize documents efficiently.
What is Consensus?
Consensus is an AI-powered academic search engine that provides evidence-based insights from over 200 million research papers. It is designed to streamline literature discovery by synthesizing findings across multiple studies and through its unique Consensus Meter, which determines the level of agreement among sources for specific research questions.
Key features include:
- AI-generated literature summaries with citations.
- Consensus Meter, which categorizes research findings into "Yes," "Possibly," or "No" based on aggregated study results.
- Chat capabilities through Copilot, allowing interactive exploration of research papers.
- Pro Analysis, which provides more detailed citations, study snapshots, and in-depth research overviews.
- Ranking of top 20 research papers based on citation velocity, study design, and publication recency.
- Transparency in AI-generated results, ensuring users can verify and explore cited sources directly.
Primary Functions of AnswerThis
Literature review
AnswerThis offers in depth literature reviews for research questions, using a database of 250 million plus research papers from credible sources. The literature review offers prompt assistance, from finding gaps in research to generating research proposals, streamlining research and simplifying the user interface. AnswerThis also provides extensive customizability for its searches, filtering papers by quality and number of citations, whether to search the internet, and more. The literature review includes in text citations for all resources used, alongside brief summaries of their contents.
Citation Assistance
Generated responses contain automatic citations, which help users easily distinguish the source of any information as well as ensuring content isn’t hallucinated. Citations can easily be stored in your library for future reference, making organization effortless and ensuring important resources aren’t lost. Another great feature is the Citation Map, which displays interconnected relationships for a provided citation, accessing similar research for the user's convenience.
Citation and Paper Management
The main feature of AnswerThis’s file management is its Library, which stores users' citations, papers, and imported files. Users can export files from their library to their computer or external reference manager, alongside importing BIB files. The Projects tab offers users the ability to organize their library by research topic, as well as automatically importing newly added citations to the active project.
Writing Assistance
AnswerThis also boasts in depth writing assistance, through the newly released Editor. The Editor allows users to alter and create documents from their library, and full AI integration can generate outlines, paraphrase existing sections, and continue passages. A key part of the editor is the ability to preview changes prior to accepting them, offering users better control and quality in their work. In addition to generating and providing assistance for literature reviews, AnswerThis also allows users to create, edit and export research proposals, gap analyses and quantitative analyses.
PDF Analysis and Breakdown
Another prominent feature is the ability to “chat” with PDFs, either uploaded or from the users library. Users can highlight segments for an explanation, as well further query the PDF to save time in gaining understanding of complicated topics. Multiple PDFs can be analyzed at the same time for gap analysis or for the purposes of a quantitative analysis.
Primary Functions of Consensus
Research Queries
Consensus synthesizes research article results, providing a summary of papers pulled from their research database of some 200 million plus papers. Important points are extracted from papers and provided as key takeaways to simplify the research process. Consensus also allows users to filter their search for papers by sample size, study methodology, and human or animal studies if the paper is open access.
Consensus Meter
By far their biggest feature is the Consensus Meter, which determines which percent of relevant papers agree with, are undecided on, or reject yes/no questions. Designed to display the scientific consensus of research papers on a given question, It provides users with an easy way to cross reference papers. Unfortunately, results aren’t guaranteed - Consensus warns that the model will incorrectly classify results 10% of the time.
Citation Assistance
Consensus’s Pro Analysis offers line by line citations in generated responses, providing easy access to sources of information. Another key feature evaluating research papers is the Consensus Snapshot, which provides publish dates, methods of research, publishing journal quality rating, the sum of citations across the papers, as well as the population size of the study. It also uses machine learning to identify potentially influential citations for a given paper.
Ask Paper
Consensus also allows users to chat with articles and uploaded papers, getting detailed responses and explanations using Copilot. It can also explain the methodology behind the research.
Feature Comparison
Feature | AnswerThis | Consensus |
Main Purpose | AI-powered research assistant for literature reviews, citation management, and full research project support | AI-powered research search engine with evidence synthesis and Consensus Meter |
Paper Search & Summarization | Finds and summarizes relevant studies with paragraph-level citations | Searches academic papers and provides AI-generated summaries |
Literature Review Generation | Generates structured, citation-backed literature reviews | Uses AI to synthesize findings and generate literature reviews |
Citation Management | Citation maps, export to reference managers, personalized research libraries | Extracts citations but offers limited citation management options |
Chat with PDFs | Yes, allows research queries within PDFs and explains highlighted text | Yes, enables interactive discussions with papers using Copilot |
Consensus Meter | AnswerThis does not provide an equivalent, out of a belief that it is not a reliable method of analysis | Consensus Meter quantifies agreement across studies for yes/no questions |
Research Proposal & Project Reports | Yes, supports proposal writing and research project management | No research workflow support |
Filtering & Customization | Allows filtering by journal quality, study type, domain (.gov, .edu), and publication date | Filtering based on journal quality, study type, publication date, study size |
AI Writing Assistance | Yes, provides full AI-powered editing and summarization tools | No AI writing assistance |
Security & Privacy | Ensures data privacy and does not share user data | Provides transparency in AI results but lacks specific privacy guarantees |
Ease of Use | Easy to use, with tutorials for advanced features | Intuitive interface, but some learning curve for advanced features |
Installation Requirements | Web-based, no installation required | Web-based, no installation required |
Cost | $22/month for unlimited research and citations | $12/month for unlimited Pro Analysis features |
Uploadable Formats | PDFs, URLs, RIS, BIB, CSV files | PDF files only |
Free Version Details | 10 free credits for testing core features | Unlimited searches, 10 uses of pro features per month |
Key Differences
- Consensus Meter vs. AnswerThis Research Model: The Consensus Meter provides a quick snapshot of scientific agreement, whereas AnswerThis offers detailed literature reviews with direct citations.
- Citation Management: AnswerThis provides a robust citation management system, including citation maps and library functions. Consensus focuses on finding citations, although they concede that their Yes/No approach to valuing papers is often unreliable.
- Writing & Editing: AnswerThis offers full AI-powered editing and writing tools, while Consensus does not offer writing assistance beyond search and synthesis.
- Customization & Filtering: AnswerThis allows for intricate filtering of sources, while Consensus primarily ranks sources based on predefined metrics such as citation number and recency.
- Research Workflow Integration: AnswerThis offers research project support, assistance with paper writing, and structured reports, whereas Consensus is primarily a literature discovery and synthesis tool.
Recommendation
- Choose AnswerThis if you need a comprehensive research assistant with full literature review generation, citation tracking, and AI-assisted writing features. It’s ideal for students and researchers managing full projects who require citation-backed structured research. Try it today for free!
- Choose Consensus if you need quick, synthesized insights from research papers and a tool that helps gauge scientific consensus on a given topic. It’s primarily for academics and professionals looking for an evidence-based search engine rather than full-scale research project management.
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