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Consensus searches a database of over 220 million peer-reviewed research papers from journals worldwide. It covers every domain of science, from astronomy to sociology to biochemistry, and is updated weekly.

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Sources

Consensus has the second-largest research index in the world, after Google Scholar. It’s built by aggregating a wide range of sources in three layers:
Pyramid showing three layers: abstracts and metadata across all publishers from Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, and PubMed; all open-access full text; and full text of paywalled papers from partner publishers

Abstracts and metadata for every paper, full text for open-access papers, and full text for paywalled papers through publisher partnerships.

Every paper in the index has its abstract and metadata, regardless of publisher. This layer comes from:
  • Semantic Scholar, which draws on over 50 direct partnerships with publishers, data providers, and aggregators covering more than 500 journals, university presses, and scholarly societies.
  • OpenAlex, an open database that connects papers, authors, institutions, journals, and topics worldwide.
  • PubMed, over 37 million biomedical and life-science records.
  • Consensus’s own crawl of the scholarly web, which fills the coverage gaps the aggregators miss.
Consensus pulls in the full text of every open-access paper. That lets it read the whole paper, not just the abstract, when searching and synthesizing, and lets you see exactly where in the paper each piece of information comes from.
Partnerships with publishers allow Consensus to use the full text of paywalled papers in its search and synthesis. We provide a link to the paper page. Consensus doesn’t replace your subscription; it complements it.Partners include Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, Wolters Kluwer, Oxford University Press, the American Chemical Society, De Gruyter Brill, BMJ, the American Psychological Association, AAAS, JAMA Network, the American Society for Microbiology, Rockefeller University Press, and many more. See Full text access.
Together, these layers cover nearly all of the highest-impact journals and the entirety of PubMed.

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What’s in the index

  • Primarily peer-reviewed journal articles, along with some conference papers and preprints.
  • Preprints are included and labeled. Use the Exclude preprints filter (or exclude_preprints in the API and MCP) to keep only peer-reviewed work.
  • Retracted papers are marked with a RETRACTED badge and are never used in AI analyses or summaries.
  • Q1 journal coverage across disciplines, including Nature, Cell, NEJM, JAMA, American Economic Review, Econometrica, and Chemical Reviews. Q1 means the top 25% of journals in a field by SCImago Journal Rank.

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Select your corpus

Open the Corpus dropdown in the search bar to choose what Consensus searches.

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More control over the papers that surface

Consensus has a number of proprietary filters built for researchers. These include:
  • 19 study types, from RCTs and cohort studies to systematic reviews and meta-analyses
  • Country, where the study population is from
  • Journals, by SCImago journal rank
  • Publishers, with 44 to choose from
Plus publication year, citation count, sample size, study duration, human or animal setting, open access, and preprints. Queries can also include DOIs, author names, paper titles, MeSH synonyms, and Boolean operators.

Every filter, explained

The full list of filters, what each one does, and how to apply them.

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Next

How search works

What happens between your query and the answer.

Full text access

Which papers Consensus can read in full, and how.