What is Consensus?
Consensus is an AI-powered academic search engine that helps students and researchers find credible answers to research questions. It searches over 200 million peer-reviewed papers using advanced language models to summarize key findings. Drawing from the Semantic Scholar corpus, it provides evidence-based insights with traceable citations, ensuring access to high-quality academic content.
Who can use Consensus?
The Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts has a campus license for Consensus. Members of the institution can access the premium version by creating an account with their institutional email address.
Which functionalities does Consensus offer?
Research
Consensus streamlines research by searching, filtering, and analyzing peer-reviewed publications. Instead of listing links, it delivers direct, evidence-based answers, showing both supporting and opposing findings. Each result includes citations and links to abstracts, with full-text access when available. While keyword searches work, fully-formed questions perform better. Users are encouraged to use natural language queries, such as direct questions, concept relationships, or open-ended phrases, for more accurate and relevant results.
Deep search
Deep Search is a research tool that transforms user questions into a structured multi-step strategy, identifying key terms, related topics, counterarguments, and foundational studies. It analyzes up to 50 academic sources and delivers a concise report with only the most relevant, high-quality findings.
Ask the paper
This feature allows users to ask specific questions about individual academic papers and receive AI-generated answers from the content. Instead of reading entire texts manually, researchers can quickly extract relevant insights, streamlining the analysis of complex academic literature.
Additional features
Consensus Meter visually shows how much agreement exists across studies for yes/no questions, helping users quickly identify supporting or opposing evidence and evaluate claims more easily than traditional searches.
- Study Snapshot shows whether seven key attributes (methods, outcomes, population, sample size, duration, location, and results) are present in each citation.
- Search filters improve accuracy by letting users filter results by journal quality, date, study design, citations, and methods.
- Reference management. Users can save search results and papers, generate citations in preferred styles, integrate with tools like Zotero, and export results in RIS or CSV format for easy organization.
Where can I find support (in English)
Websites:
Videos: