SciSpace is a powerful and versatile AI-powered literature review assistant that makes it easier to find papers, synthesise information and understand your research topic. In this in-depth review, we evaluate how SciSpace performs, how reliable it is, the pricing, and how it compares to other popular AI research tools.
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What is SciSpace?
SciSpace is an AI-powered literature review tool with 10+ unique features and functionalities. The primary aim of SciSpace is to use AI to understand and draw connections between research papers. It’s designed to assist at every step of the literature review process, from finding papers relevant to your research question to helping you understand critical findings.
Here are key use-cases of how to use SciSpace to assist in your literature review:
- Search for literature from a question rather than keywords
- Scan your existing collection of PDFs for specific criteria
- Chat with a single PDF to find relevant literature and explain concepts
- Use SciSpace as a browser extension to interact with websites
- Write, paraphrase and test AI detection
- Chat with your research using SciSpace + ChatGPT
- Save notes
- Do a deep-dive with Deep Review
I’ll break down each of the use cases one-by-one, giving you an idea of how to use SciSpace step-by-step in the lit review. Let’s get started!
8 Ways to use SciSpace in Literature Review
To use SciSpace for your research, you can try out the variety of features available. Below are the top 8 use cases for how to use SciSpace throughout the literature review.
2026 UpdateSciSpace has increasingly shifted from a collection of separate AI tools towards SciSpace Agent, which can carry out multi-step research tasks such as searching literature, analysing papers, extracting data and more. As of late 2026, agent usage is credit-based. The free plan includes 100 Agent credits per month, while paid tiers provide larger allowances.
👉 Interested in AI agents? SciSpace Agent is just one example of how agentic AI is starting to change academic research. In the Academic AI Agents Course, we take a deep dive in the wild world of agentic AI for academics.
1. Search for your research topic and find relevant papers
One of the key ways to get started with SciSpace is when it comes to searching for papers for your literature review. With SciSpace, you don’t need to rely on keyword searches (which can potentially cause you to miss out on finding related literature). Instead, you can search your papers using a question or phrase. This is called a semantic search. Internally, SciSpace utilises AI first to understand what you are looking for and then cross-reference it with the content of the papers in its database (282M at the time of this writing).
Your search result will be a paragraph of text answering your question. It will generally contain 5-10 citations and use academic jargon. Below, you will find the papers listed individually and can add columns that summarise a specific aspect of the study. In the example above, we are looking to summarise the model organism and location of the study for a set of ecological papers.
After reviewing your results, you can refine your search by selecting the papers that seem relevant and clicking the “Show more like selected” button. SciSpace will learn a little bit better what you are looking for and add similar papers to the list of selected papers.
Save relevant papers to “Collections” for later analysis. A collection is essentially a folder containing a number of papers.
2. Analyse dozens of papers at once
Now that you have a collection of PDFs (from the first step or elsewhere), you can use SciSpace to search through the content of these PDFs. This is useful if you are dealing with more niche literature that might not be in their database or when you are working on a systematic literature review and selecting papers with a reproducible keyword search. To use this feature:
- Go to “My Library” in the side-bar
- Click “Upload PDFs”
- Upload your research papers as PDFs
- Review the auto-generated table of papers, with summaries
- Add additional columns to run analyses (conclusions, results, limitations, literature survey, etc.)
SciSpace’s analysis of papers generates a table, which you can add columns based on whatever new analyses you’d like to run. The most powerful feature is the ability to create custom columns, based on your instructions. These will run analyses across all your PDFs based on your prompt.
For example, I have a large collection of papers on the topic of range shifts in climate change. It is generally assumed that the changing climate makes plants shift their locations. However, a growing body of literature suggests that competition between plant species also plays a significant role. To find all studies that deal with these so-called “biotic interactions,” I made a column titled “Relevance to biotic interactions.” Note how, in the screenshot below, some studies have an N/A in this column. This means the paper is irrelevant to this particular topic and we didn’t even have to open the PDF to find this out!
3. Get detailed insights for a single paper (SciSpace Chat with PDF)
Using SciSpace’s “Chat with PDF”, you can have an AI conversation with a paper. Upload a paper or select one from your library and start asking questions. You can even tell SciSpace to recommend questions, helping you think more like a scientist. Additionally, it speaks many languages, so while the paper may be in English, you can converse in any language you choose.
To the Chat with PDF feature in SciSpace:
- Click “Chat with PDF” in the side-bar
- Upload your PDF
- Ask any question about the content of the article
This feautre is especially useful when you need specific details from within a paper. For example, when you are writing your manuscript, you’ll need to make statements about your citations. To double-check that you cited something correctly, you can upload the cited PDF to SciSpace and ask, “Does this paper support the statement…”.
👉 Want to learn more about using AI for better academic writing? Check out my top 11 lessons here.
Conversational AI agents like the SciSpace Chat with PDF work best if you give them a single task at a time. To solve more complex tasks, SciSpace offers the possibility to ask follow-up questions. For example, ask it to identify the core problem in a paper and then the proposed solution.
4. Read any paper faster: SciSpace Chrome Browser Extension
In addition to the in-app features above, SciSpace has a Chrome extension too. When browsing for papers, use this plug-in to quickly skim papers to decide whether the paper is worth reading. To use the SciSpace Chrome extension:
- Install the extension from the Google Chrome store
- Navigate in the Google Chrome browser to a research article page
- Next, click on the extension
- Start asking the paper questions directly in the browser. Try questions like “Does this paper cover X?” or “Does this paper use X method?”. For a quicker understanding, try to “summarise the results.”
Read papers in any language
Occasionally, we’ll need to conduct research in different languages. Some domains have a large body of work that is not translated into English. Some Wikipedia pages also vary significantly in detail depending on their language. For this purpose, the extension allows you to extract information from and to any language. Use the SciSpace Chrome Extension to translate and summarise insights.
5. Paraphrase your writing easily
The paraphraser tool, as the name suggests, can paraphrase text. You can adjust the tone, which is helpful when rewriting highly technical information into a more casual language, or vice versa. Your text can then be shorter or longer while adjusting the magnitude of these changes.
Plus, the paraphraser tool can also translate your text into any language. This is useful if you want to write an initial first draft of some text in your native language and then use AI to translate it to academic English. As a matter of fact, this is just as useful even if the original text was written in English, but simply not the academic-English that other researchers will expect.
6. Detect AI-generated text in your paper
SciSpace has an AI detector for academic writing: the Academic AI Detector. You can run text through this tool to evaluate whether it was written by a human or AI.
It is currently debated whether AI-generated texts can be detected (here’s my take). Still, if you have worked with ChatGPT for a while, you will notice that it tends to recreate predictable structures across its replies (e.g., “In summary…”).
Below is an example of a text I wrote with a lot of assistance from AI (see this workflow), but never by just copying and pasting sentences. Instead, AI was used to inspire the writing structure and paraphrase some stubborn sentence parts. The result is pretty on point: only 2 of my 53 sentences were believed to be written by AI, according to the SciSpace Academic AI Detector.
💡Tip: Want to use AI responsibly to write your first draft? Here’s my workflow.
7. Use SciSpace with ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a potent and versatile tool that lacks precise understanding of scientific topics. Connecting SciSpace’s giant publication database with the conversational abilities of ChatGPT makes it a pretty powerful tool. This works through a custom GPT assistant. You can read what GPT assistants are and how to build your own in this tutorial. Or check out my newest course on working with AI agents for academics.
The result is a table with citations to your question. Each entry in the table is a link to SciSpace, so you can read the article in-depth.
There are currently 100s of GPTs available in ChatGPT, many of which are tailored for academics and students. Here are my 5 top AI assistant picks for academics.
8. Do an automated lit review
One of SciSpace’s most impressive, newest features is called “Deep Review”. This runs a miniature literature review for you, using an AI agent. I cover this use case in-depth here.
In a nutshell, SciSpace Deep Review runs an entirely automated mini literature review for your research query. In the example below, it analysed 1,750 papers, found 320 relevant to my query, and then created a comprehensive answer based on the data from the top 20 papers. These automated lit reviews are a great way to learn about a new topic, or to jump-start your literature review in a new field.
👉 Want to build a complete AI-assisted literature review workflow? The Literature Review Course (part of the Lit Review learning track) goes beyond individual tools and shows you how to combine the best apps for searching, screening, and synthesising academic literature efficiently.
Can I use SciSpace for systematic literature review?
Although you can use any tool to assist in a systematic literature review, you will want to be careful how you incorporate them into your final paper. A systematic literature review systematically reviews all literature that fulfills specific criteria (e.g., employs a particular methodology). This ensures others can reproduce your search (and findings). Using an AI algorithm, however, often leads to (1) slightly deviating results every time you run it and (2) may be incomplete. It is not reproducible, which makes your review not systematic (as of 2026, SciSpace Agent workflows can log searches, deduplicate results, screen/extract papers and generate PRISMA outputs — we still remain recalcitrant to grant AI agents full autonomy for a lit review, but the improvements are real).
Many researchers would likely caution you to avoid using AI and tools like SciSpace to search in the context of a systematic literature review. But once you have found the papers using a reproducible keyword search in a database like Pubmed, you can use SciSpace to analyse these for criteria. This will save you a lot of time.
What is SciSpace Copilot?
SciSpace Copilot is an older name for the current-day AI chat feature that SciSpace offers. In the past, they called their AI-powered research assistant “Copilot” or “Copilot for Chrome” in the case of the Chrome Extension. Today, you likely won’t see this term around anymore, but the functionality behind it is the same. The copilot was simply the AI chat interface, which still exists across the website and is embedded into nearly every aspect of the present-day SciSpace application.
Is SciSpace reliable?
When using AI tools like SciSpace, which can radically accelerate some parts of the lit review process, it’s natural that we should wonder just how accurate the tool is. In the case of SciSpace, the good news is that most features rely on PDFs to answer questions or conduct analysis.
SciSpace bypasses a lot of the safety and trust concerns that occur when using other, more generic AI clients (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.). If you simply ask these other AI chats questions about your research, without uploading any papers, you’ll still get some answers. Tracing back these answers to the correct citations in those cases can be tricky or impossible. But, SciSpace relies either on your uploaded PDFs, or papers it finds in its database. Therefore, it can be considered a more reliable choice for researchers, since it allows better transparency and traceability.
Other reliable tools in this space include Consensus, Liner, NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook) and Scite.
SciSpace Pricing
You can get an incredible amount of work done for free with SciSpace. However, just like with ChatGPT, you will need a premium subscriptions to fully leverage its functionality. The pricing is bsaed on a monthly subscription, like many other AI tools.
As of 2026, SciSpace Agent now operates on monthly credits: Free 100, Premium 1,200, Advanced 10,000, Max 40,000. SciSpace standalone Literature Review, AI Writer, Paraphraser, Citation Generator and Notebook features do not consume these Agent credits.
SciSpace Discount Code
If you are considering getting SciSpace premium, you can use the codes Effortless20 and Effortless40 to get 20% off the monthly subscription or 40% off the yearly subscription, respectively.
👉 Get discounts off other popular research tools by viewing my full list of codes here.
Summary
SciSpace offers features that assist in all stages of the literature review process:
- When looking for papers: use the literature review feature to find papers that match your question and add them to your library.
- Once you’ve created your library: Use the AI columns to compare and contrast papers, while narrowing in on the key literature.
- Analayse papers: Ask questions alongside your thorough reading and note-taking process.
However, there are some cases when you may want to use SciSpace with caution. For example, if you’re doing a systematic literature review, because the search results will not always be reproducible.
Although SciSpace is free, it also offers a premium subscription if you’d like to dive deeper.
SciSpace the perfect first step for an in-depth literature review process. If you want to learn more about how to integrate it into your entire research workflow, check out my free 21-day course on note-taking and project management for academics.
