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Consensus has the second-largest research index in the world, after Google Scholar. It searches over 400 million scholarly articles, including 350 million peer-reviewed research papers. The index covers every domain of science, from astronomy to sociology to biochemistry, and is updated weekly.

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Sources

The index is 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.Consensus partners with 7 of the 10 largest academic publishers. 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, and Rockefeller University Press, with more on the way. 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

  • 400M+ scholarly articles in total. About 350 million are peer-reviewed, published research papers. The other 50 million or so are other scholarly sources, such as books and conference proceedings.
  • 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

Click + in the search bar, then Search corpus, to choose what Consensus searches.
The + menu open on Search corpus, showing the All, Medical, and My Library options

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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.
  1. Cast a wide net. Hybrid search matches your query against all 400M+ articles, by meaning (AI semantic search) and by exact keywords. Natural-language questions, Boolean operators, and exact matches all work.
  2. Rank by quality. The top 1,500 are re-ranked the way a researcher would weigh them: about 80% on how well each paper matches your question, and about 20% on quality signals like citation count, recency, and journal reputation.
  3. Pick the best 20. A larger model re-reads the top papers for precision.
  4. Check relevance. Separate models confirm each paper actually addresses your question. If none do, Consensus says so.
  5. Write the answer. Only now does AI summarize, using only those papers.
The full walkthrough, step by step, is in Paper search.
You should now know: what Consensus searches, and how to switch between All, Medical, and My Library under + › Search corpus.