Skip to main content
The Consensus API searches the scholarly literature by meaning and returns papers with the evidence details already attached. Its research agent goes further: it crawls citations, traces authors and plans multi-step searches, the way a researcher would. This page explains what it’s built for, how teams use it alongside the free scholarly APIs (PubMed, Europe PMC, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar and Crossref), and how they compare. The pages under Compare scholarly APIs go deeper on each topic.

​
Why teams choose the Consensus API

400M+ papers across every field

400 million scholarly articles, 350 million of them peer-reviewed, from astronomy to sociology. Includes all of PubMed. Updated weekly.

Full text from publisher partners

Search reaches into the full text of open-access papers and of paywalled papers from 7 of the 10 largest academic publishers.

Ask in plain language

Hybrid semantic and keyword search, ranked for scientific relevance. Send the question as written. Boolean queries work too.

First-party evidence filters

Filter by study type, sample size, journal quartile, human or animal studies, country of study, study duration, citations and more.

Full-text snippets for grounding

Get the passages from each paper that answer your query, labeled by section, ready to put in front of an LLM.

A research agent, not just search

The Threads API plans a search strategy, crawls citations, looks up authors and reads full papers, then writes an answer with numbered citations and the quotes behind them.
Publisher partners whose full text Consensus searches include:
WileyTaylor & FrancisSAGEWolters KluwerOxford University PressAmerican Chemical SocietyDe Gruyter BrillBMJAmerican Psychological AssociationAAASJAMA NetworkAmerican Society for Microbiology
Partner full text improves which papers rank and powers analysis in the Consensus app. The snippets the API returns come from open-access papers. See Full text in the API. Every paper in a response carries the details you’d otherwise have to dig for: study_type, sample_size, sjr_best_quartile, population_type, countries_of_study, citation_count, is_preprint and a one-sentence takeaway. Your code, or your model, can weigh the evidence without opening the paper.

​
How teams combine Consensus with open APIs

Most teams don’t pick one API. They use Consensus to find the evidence, then call the free APIs for what those do best.
1

Find and rank the papers with Consensus

Send the research question as written. Filter to the study designs and sample sizes you trust, and pull full-text snippets for the papers your model will read.
2

Enrich the results with open metadata

Every Consensus result has a DOI. Use it to pull citation graphs and similar papers from Semantic Scholar, author, institution and funder data from OpenAlex, or registration metadata from Crossref.
3

Run a Boolean strategy where a protocol requires one

For the search you report in a systematic review, run a reproducible Boolean query in PubMed or Europe PMC, and use Consensus to check you haven’t missed the strongest studies.
This works smoothly because Consensus builds on the same open records: its index aggregates Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex and PubMed, then adds its own crawl of the scholarly web, publisher full text, evidence classification and ranking.

​
At a glance

A dash (—) means we didn’t find the feature in that provider’s API documentation as of November 2026.

​
Evidence metadata and full text

​
Pricing and rate limits

A Consensus call covers up to 100 papers, and the API and MCP server share one monthly pool. See plans and access.

​
Compare in depth

Biomedical search: Consensus, PubMed and Europe PMC

Semantic search over PubMed’s records, study-design filters, and when a Boolean strategy is the right tool.

Open metadata: OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar and Crossref

What each open API does best, and how to enrich Consensus results with it.

Retrieval for RAG and AI agents

What a RAG pipeline needs from a search API, and when web search APIs like Exa and Tavily fit.

Pricing, rate limits and data privacy

Costs, limits and interfaces side by side, and what each provider does with your queries.

Search quality evaluations

Two blind relevance studies: more relevant than Google Scholar, and more relevant than GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 in a fraction of the time.

​
FAQ

Partly. Consensus aggregates metadata and abstracts from Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex and PubMed, crawls the scholarly web to fill the gaps, and adds full text from open-access papers and publisher partners. On top of that it classifies each paper’s study design and sample size and ranks results for scientific relevance. See where the papers come from.
Yes. Every plan includes API access. The Free plan has 30 calls a month and up to 20 papers per request, without pagination or full-text snippets. See plans and access.
Every search matches against full text where it’s available. On paid plans, include_full_text_chunks=true adds up to 3 query-relevant passages per paper from open-access papers. See Full text in the API.
No. Customer data isn’t used to train AI models, and the LLM providers Consensus uses keep no data from requests. See Pricing, rate limits and data privacy.
The API is a REST interface for your own code. The MCP server gives AI assistants and agents, such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor, the same search and research agent as tools. Both draw on one monthly pool of calls.

​
Sources

Facts about other providers were checked against their official documentation on 5 November 2026. Limits and prices change, so check the source before you build on a number.
  1. About PubMed: “more than 40 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature”; “does not include full text journal articles”; a free resource.
  2. PubMed User Guide: Boolean operators, field tags, MeSH and Best Match sorting.
  3. E-utilities in depth, ESearch: sort=relevance is the default Best Match order on web PubMed.
  4. About Europe PMC: 49.2 million abstracts and 12.5 million full-text articles; searches abstracts and full text; searches can be limited to clinical trials, preprints or article sections such as Methods; free to anyone.
  5. OpenAlex works: more than 320 million works in the core catalog.
  6. OpenAlex search: search= matches works by title, abstract, full text and keywords; Boolean and phrase searches are supported.
  7. OpenAlex semantic search: embeds title, abstract and venue name; up to 50 results per query; 1 request a second; 17 supported filters, and others such as cited_by_count return a 400 error.
  8. Semantic Scholar API overview: 214 million papers; unauthenticated requests share 1,000 requests a second across all users and may be throttled under heavy use; the introductory limit for an API key is 1 request a second. The API also serves SPECTER2 embeddings and a Recommendations service for similar papers.
  9. Semantic Scholar Academic Graph API reference: /paper/search (up to 1,000 relevance-ranked results), /paper/search/bulk (Boolean), /snippet/search (passages of about 500 words from title, abstract and body), and the publicationTypes, minCitationCount and venue filters.
  10. total-results from https://api.crossref.org/works?rows=0 on 5 November 2026: 188,499,975.
  11. Crossref REST API: bibliographic metadata including funding, licence and abstracts; no sign-up required; most metadata isn’t subject to copyright.
  12. NLM publication types.
  13. About PMC: “more than 10 million full-text article records”.
  14. Europe PMC developer resources: REST, SOAP, OAI-PMH and FTP access to open-access content and metadata; automated bulk download of other content isn’t allowed. The Articles RESTful API includes /{id}/fullTextXML.
  15. OpenAlex study designs: seven designs tagged automatically from title and abstract; each value right at least 96% of the time.
  16. OpenAlex full text: cached PDF and TEI XML for more than 60 million open-access works.
  17. A General Introduction to the E-utilities: more than 3 requests a second without an API key returns an error; with a key, up to 10 a second by default; higher rates by request. Requests without registered tool and email values may be blocked.
  18. Europe PMC team on the Europe PMC web services forum, 1 October 2024: the rate limit is 10 requests a second (500 a minute), and no API key is required.
  19. OpenAlex pricing: all data CC0; $1 of free API usage a day with a key; annual plans from $5,000 a year; the whole database can be downloaded as a snapshot refreshed every quarter. A keyless response notes that it shares a $0.10 daily budget per IP address.
  20. OpenAlex authentication and rate limits: 10 requests a second with no key, 30 with a free key or prepaid usage, 50 on an annual plan; semantic search is limited to 1 a second.
  21. Crossref access and authentication: public pool 5 requests a second, polite pool 10, Metadata Plus 150.