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For students, researchers and academic writers

Academic writing, grounded in your own sources.

Papernex is a writing editor for theses, papers and literature reviews. Upload the PDFs you work from, ask questions and get answers that cite them by page, and insert references in the style your department or journal asks for. You stay the author.

Start writing freeSee how it works

Free plan available. No credit card required.

The Papernex editor, illustrated with sample content: a draft with in-text citations and an autocomplete suggestion, beside an AI Chat answer that cites two PDFs by page.
Cited by page
AI Chat answers from the PDFs in your library and marks the page each point came from.
250M+ works
Search the OpenAlex index from the citation menu and add papers to your library.
45+ citation styles
Author–date, numeric and footnote styles, such as APA, IEEE and OSCOLA. Switch at any time.
Claims checked
Reviews test each cited sentence against the papers it cites and flag retracted or weak sources.

How it works

From a reading list to a cited draft

One place for the papers you read and the text you write, instead of a PDF reader, a reference manager and a word processor that don't talk to each other.

  1. Step 1: Build your library

    Upload the PDFs you are reading, import a BibTeX file, or find papers in Discover. Each PDF gets its title, authors and date filled in and is indexed page by page.

  2. Step 2: Ask and draft

    Ask AI Chat what your papers say and get answers with page citations. In the editor, use / or Ask AI to draft, continue or revise a passage.

  3. Step 3: Cite as you write

    Type @ to cite from your library or Discover. Choose from 45+ styles, including APA, MLA and Chicago, and switch whenever you need to.

  4. Step 4: Revise and export

    Write with co-authors in real time, save versions before big edits, and export to PDF, Word (.docx) or plain text.

Features

Built around the work of academic writing

Organised the way a project unfolds: reading and synthesising, writing with citations, revising with co-authors, and preparing a version to submit.

01/Literature review

Keep the literature in one place, and ask it questions

Upload the PDFs you are reading. Papernex fills in titles, authors, DOIs and dates for you, then indexes every paper page by page so you can search it, cite it and ask about it.

  • Find papers in the more than 250 million works indexed by OpenAlex: filter by year, citations, field, type and open access, follow a paper's references and citing papers, and import its free PDF when there is one.
  • Bring the references you already have: import BibTeX, RIS, CSL-JSON or Zotero RDF files, or connect Zotero and sync your library.
  • Organise sources with collections and tags, mark what you have read, search inside every PDF, and merge duplicates.
  • Highlight PDFs in five colours, add notes, and cite a highlight with its page number. Each paper gets an AI summary of its findings, methods and limitations.

02/Staying grounded

Answers that show their sources, down to the page

Ask AI Chat about your library and each point in the answer is numbered to the excerpt it came from. Hover a number to see the paper and page; click it to cite that paper in your draft.

  • Every answer lists the papers it drew on as “title (p.12)”, so you can open the PDF and check the passage yourself.
  • “Insert to doc” places an answer below your cursor and turns its numbers into real citations.
  • Include the current document as context when you want the assistant to read your draft too, attach up to five papers to focus a conversation, or switch on web search for recent information.

03/Writing with citations

Cite as you write, in the style you need

Type @ to search your library or Discover and insert an in-text citation. Each citation keeps the full reference, so the whole document can switch styles at any time.

  • 45+ author–date, numeric and footnote styles, including APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, Nature and OSCOLA.
  • Paste a DOI, arXiv ID, ISBN, PubMed ID or URL to cite a specific work, or enter a reference by hand.
  • Click any citation to see its authors, abstract and DOI, or open the PDF in the built-in viewer.

04/Drafting and revising

Draft and revise with AI, without handing over the pen

Press / for headings, tables and AI, or select a passage and choose Ask AI. Suggestions arrive as a preview you can insert, replace, try again or discard.

  • Edit a selection: improve writing, fix spelling and grammar, make it shorter or longer, simplify, use an academic tone, paraphrase or explain.
  • Write at the cursor: continue writing, write a paragraph, summarise the document, create an outline or draft a conclusion.
  • Autocomplete suggests the next sentence in grey. Press Tab to accept it, or switch it off.
  • Workflows write a literature review or a research gap analysis from your library, turn a research question into an outline, draft or rewrite a cited section, and turn your supervisor's feedback into a revision plan, step by step.

05/Collaborating

Write with co-authors and supervisors

Add people to your workspace by email and edit the same document at the same time, with named cursors and live sync. Discuss passages in comment threads, @mention a co-author, or send your supervisor a read-only or comment-only link. Save a version before each round of feedback and restore it later: Free keeps 5 versions per document, Pro keeps 100.

06/Submitting

Export when it is ready to submit

Download your draft as PDF, Word (.docx), plain text or a LaTeX project you can open in Overleaf, and turn it into PowerPoint slides with speaker notes. While you write, the editor handles headings, tables, diagrams, images, inline LaTeX math and code blocks, and the word count shows words, characters, paragraphs and reading time.

Research tools

From first reading to the final check

Review your claims before you submit, turn feedback into a plan, and make the diagrams, statistics and slides your paper needs without leaving the editor.

See every feature

Who it's for

For the people who write research

Whether it is your first literature review or your fortieth paper, the work is the same: read closely, synthesise honestly, cite correctly and revise until it is right.

For students

PhD and master's students

Writing a thesis, a dissertation chapter or a literature review, often for the first time at this length.

Turn a reading list into a review
Add papers as you read them and ask how they compare, with page citations you can check before you paraphrase.
Meet your department's style guide
Cite in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard and more, and switch the whole thesis if the requirement changes.
Work alongside your supervisor
Add your supervisor to the workspace to edit the draft with you, and save a version before each round of feedback.
Start without paying
The free plan includes 10 documents, 10 library sources and a daily AI allowance. No credit card required.

For researchers

Researchers and academics

Early-career and established researchers writing papers, chapters and proposals, often with co-authors.

Write from your whole library
Pro removes the document and source limits and accepts PDFs of up to 150 pages.
Co-author in one document
Edit the same manuscript at the same time, with named cursors, instead of merging copies by email.
Keep your references and your journal's style
Import a BibTeX file from your reference manager, then cite in the format your target journal uses, such as Nature, Science, Cell, PLOS, IEEE and AMA.
Set your preferences once
On Pro, workspace AI instructions apply your tone, field and citation preferences to chat, editor AI and autocomplete.

Academic integrity

You stay the author.

Papernex is built to support your scholarship, not to stand in for it. It helps you find, read and cite sources; the argument, the judgement and the responsibility remain yours.

What Papernex does not do

It does not check for plagiarism or detect AI-generated text, and like any AI it can misread a source. Check claims against the cited pages before you submit, and follow your institution's policy on AI use, including any requirement to disclose it.

  1. Answers point back to your sources

    When AI Chat draws on your library, each point carries a numbered marker linked to the paper and page it came from, so you can read the passage before you rely on it.

  2. No invented references

    The assistant is instructed to cite only the excerpts it retrieved from your library and never to make up sources, pages, quotes or DOIs. Citations you insert are records from your library or from OpenAlex, not text the AI wrote.

  3. Uncited means unsourced

    If your library does not cover a question, the assistant may answer from general knowledge, without citation markers. Treat those parts as leads to check, not as evidence.

  4. Nothing changes without you

    AI edits arrive as previews that you insert, replace, retry or discard. Autocomplete stays grey until you press Tab, and you can turn it off.

  5. Your drafts stay yours

    Documents and uploads are encrypted in transit and at rest, and are never used to train AI models.

Plans

Start free. Upgrade when your library grows.

Compare plans in detail

Free

For trying Papernex on a chapter or a short paper.

$0no credit card required

  • 10 documents and 10 library sources
  • PDFs up to 50 pages
  • 20 AI chat messages and 10 AI writing commands a day
  • Discover, BibTeX import and every citation style
Start writing free

Pro

For theses and papers written from a large library, every day.

$10per month, cancel any time

  • 500 documents and 1,000 library sources
  • PDFs up to 150 pages
  • 500 AI chat messages, 200 AI writing commands and 5,000 autocompletions a day
  • 100 claim reviews a month (Free: 3)
  • Workspace AI instructions, 100 saved versions per document, one-click PDF export
Upgrade to Pro

Questions

Frequently asked

Something else? Email info@papernex.com.

How does Papernex keep citations accurate?

Citations are records, not generated text. Papers in your library come from your PDFs (with details filled in from scholarly databases), your reference imports, Discover or an identifier such as a DOI, and AI Chat answers point to the PDF and page each point came from. The assistant is instructed never to invent sources, pages, quotes or DOIs, but AI can still misread or overstate a source, so check the cited passage before you submit. Claim confidence reviews help with exactly that.

What do the Reviews check?

Claim confidence reads each cited sentence next to the passages of the papers it cites and tells you whether the claim is supported, weakly supported, overstated, unsupported, contradicted or misrepresented, and which sentences need a citation; it shows the evidence with page links and suggests a fix. Source quality flags cited papers that were retracted, have an expression of concern or a correction, are preprints, are rarely cited or have incomplete details. Free includes 3 claim reviews a month and Pro 100; source quality checks are included on both plans.

Am I allowed to use Papernex for my thesis or papers?

That depends on your institution, programme or publisher, and policies on AI assistance differ. Papernex is designed so that you stay the author: it helps you organise, question and cite your sources, and every AI edit is a preview you choose to accept. Check your local guidance, and disclose AI use where it is required.

Are my unpublished drafts and uploaded papers private?

Yes. Your documents and uploads are encrypted in transit and at rest and stay inside your workspace. When you use an AI feature, only the text that feature needs is processed to produce the response, and we never use your content to train AI models. Our Privacy Policy has the details.

Can I bring my references from Zotero, Mendeley or EndNote?

Yes. Import BibTeX (.bib), RIS, CSL-JSON or Zotero RDF files from any reference manager, or connect Zotero and sync your library; syncing again brings in only what changed. You can also upload PDFs or find papers in Discover.

What kinds of PDFs can I upload?

PDFs with selectable text, such as articles downloaded from a publisher or a preprint server: up to 50 pages each on Free and 150 pages on Pro. Scanned PDFs that are only images of pages can't be processed yet.

Does the data analysis tool upload my data?

No. Statistics are calculated in your browser and your data file never leaves your computer. If you ask for an APA-style results paragraph, only the computed statistics are used to write it.

Can Papernex make slides or diagrams from my paper?

Yes. Slides turns a document into a PowerPoint (.pptx) deck for a defense, conference talk or class, with speaker notes, figures and references. Diagrams draws flowcharts, mind maps, timelines, Gantt charts and sequence diagrams from your text, and they stay editable in the document.

Which citation styles and export formats are supported?

45+ citation styles. Author–date: APA, MLA, Chicago (author–date), Harvard, Harvard (Cite Them Right), Elsevier Harvard, ASA, APSA, CSE (name–year), Springer Basic (author–date), Taylor & Francis, Frontiers, Chicago 17th (author–date), Turabian (author–date); numeric: IEEE, Vancouver, AMA, NLM, BMJ, The Lancet, NEJM, CSE (citation–sequence), ACS, RSC, AIP, APS, IOP, ACM, Springer LNCS, Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS, PLOS, Elsevier (numeric), Elsevier Vancouver, Springer Basic (numeric), Springer Vancouver, BMC, MDPI; footnote: Chicago (notes), Chicago 17th (notes), Turabian (notes), MHRA, OSCOLA. You can switch a document's style at any time. Documents export to PDF, Word (.docx), plain text (.txt) and LaTeX (with an Open in Overleaf option). One-click PDF export is on Pro; on Free, PDF export uses your browser's print dialog.

Can I write with co-authors or my supervisor?

Yes. Add people to your workspace by email and edit documents together in real time, with named cursors, comments and @mentions. You can also share a read-only or comment-only link that expires when you choose. If your lab or department needs several seats, email info@papernex.com.

Is there a free plan?

Yes, and no credit card is required. Free includes 10 documents, 10 library sources (PDFs up to 50 pages), and each day 20 AI chat messages, 10 AI writing commands and 50 autocompletions, plus 3 claim reviews a month and 5 saved versions per document.

What does Pro add?

Pro costs $10 a month (USD), billed monthly, and you can cancel at any time. It raises the limits to 500 documents, 1,000 library sources and PDFs up to 150 pages, with 500 chat messages, 200 writing commands and 5,000 autocompletions per day, and 100 claim reviews a month. Pro also adds workspace AI instructions, the automatic reference list, one-click PDF export and 100 saved versions per document.

Write your next chapter from your sources.

Upload a few papers, ask what they say, and cite them as you write. The free plan needs no credit card.

Start writing freeView pricing