Frequently Asked Questions About ResearchPal
Whether you're drafting a thesis chapter tonight or scoping a lab's next study, this page walks through how ResearchPal fits your research life — finding papers, reviewing the literature, chatting with dense PDFs, drafting your own argument, managing citations, and keeping every source organised in one place.
ResearchPal covers the full research journey: literature reviews, paper discovery, Connected Papers, PDF chat, paper analysis, academic writing, citations, and research-library management.
Getting Started With ResearchPal
ResearchPal is an AI-powered research workspace built around the way academic work actually happens. It helps you find relevant papers, generate literature reviews, chat with PDFs, extract structured insights from studies, draft and edit academic writing, generate and manage citations, and keep every source organised in one library — without switching between five different tools.
ResearchPal is built for undergraduate and postgraduate students, PhD researchers, professors, and academic writers, as well as research teams, universities, and professionals who rely on evidence-based research. If your work involves reading papers, citing sources, or writing from evidence, it's built with your workflow in mind.
Yes. Researchers use ResearchPal to search literature, generate reviews, analyse papers, and draft sections of theses, dissertations, papers, and assignments. That said, you remain responsible for the original thinking, analysis, and verification behind your work, and for following your institution's policies on AI-assisted research and writing.
ResearchPal offers a free-forever plan alongside Standard, Best, and custom institutional plans. Credits are the currency behind AI-heavy actions — like generating a literature review or running Paper Insights — and each plan includes a monthly credit allowance. You can start on the free plan with no card required, and upgrade only once you need more.
General AI tools generate text from what they already "know," which can drift from real sources. ResearchPal instead builds answers around actual academic papers — searching real literature, grounding output in retrievable sources, generating citations, analysing PDFs directly, and organising everything inside a research-specific workspace, rather than a general chat window.
ResearchPal's current plans provide different credit limits, project limits, AI-model access, and advanced feature availability.
Finding Academic Research
Search by topic, keyword, research question, author, or academic subject, and ResearchPal returns relevant papers from across its academic index. For each result, review the abstract, publication details, citation counts, and reference lists, then follow through to available source links before deciding what to save.
Yes. Narrow results using subject or domain filters, publication-type filters, and date ranges, or sort by relevance. An open-access toggle surfaces papers with a freely available full text, so you're not stuck behind a paywall before you've even confirmed a paper is useful.
ResearchPal searches across a wide index of open-access repositories alongside publisher- and university-connected academic databases, spanning well over 200 million papers. Coverage keeps expanding, so the exact source list is best confirmed on the Search Papers page rather than assumed from any single feature.
Yes — apply the open-access filter to surface papers with a freely available full text. Where a full PDF isn't openly available, ResearchPal still shows the abstract, metadata, and a link to the source, so you know what exists even if a paywall sits between you and the document itself.
Every paper opens into its own web of references and citations. From one result, move into papers it cites, papers that cite it, and related studies — drilling several layers deep into a topic without losing your place, since your original search stays anchored while you explore outward.
ResearchPal's paper-search feature includes academic filters, open-access discovery, paper metadata, citations, references, summaries, and saving results to a research library.
Literature Reviews and Connected Research
Enter a topic or research question, choose your research depth, and ResearchPal searches relevant academic papers on your behalf. Review the shortlisted sources, and it generates a structured, citation-backed review from them — ready to save into the document editor.
- Enter a topic or research question
- Select the required research depth
- ResearchPal searches relevant academic papers
- Review the shortlisted sources
- Generate structured, citation-backed content
- Save the review to the editor
Fast Literature is built for quick topic exploration — a concise summary of the landscape when you need orientation fast. Deep Research draws on more sources and depth, suited to thesis chapters, dissertations, and full academic literature reviews, where comprehensiveness matters more than speed.
Yes. Review the papers ResearchPal suggests, remove any that aren't relevant, add your own preferred sources, and regenerate the review once your selection reflects the literature you actually want covered — rather than a fixed, uneditable source list.
Yes. Citations are extracted and saved automatically as your review generates, in your chosen citation style. Each source links back to its full reference, and references can be inserted directly into your document inside the editor — no separate copy-pasting between a search tab and your draft.
Connected Papers turns a single paper into a visual graph — nodes for papers, links for citations and shared keywords. It surfaces related studies you might not find through keyword search alone, letting you follow a citation trail or keyword cluster outward to uncover new research directions.
Choose between faster and deeper literature-review workflows, refine the papers used, regenerate content, save it to the editor, and organise the related citations.
PDFs and Paper Analysis
Yes. Upload or import a PDF and ask it questions directly — predefined prompts about the abstract, methodology, results, limitations, and contributions, or your own custom questions. It's a faster way into a dense paper than reading it cover to cover before you know if it's relevant.
Yes. Answers reference the specific passage in the document they're drawn from, and you can jump straight to that highlighted section inside the original PDF — so you can confirm an answer against the source text rather than taking it on faith.
Paper Insights pulls a structured breakdown from a paper, turning a long PDF into sections you can scan or dig into individually:
- Summary / TL;DR
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Methodology
- Datasets
- Results
- Conclusions
- Limitations
- Contributions
- Literature survey
- Practical implications
Yes. Select several papers and ResearchPal lines them up in structured comparison columns, making it easier to spot where studies agree, diverge, or use different methods. Adjust how much detail each column shows, depending on whether you need a quick scan or a close read.
Where available, export insights and comparisons in research-friendly formats, including CSV, Excel, RIS, BibTeX, and XML — useful for feeding results into a reference manager, a spreadsheet for your own analysis, or a supervisor's preferred format.
Yes. Screenshot a figure or chart from a PDF and ask ResearchPal to explain or visually remix it. Treat any redesigned graphic as a starting point, though — check labels, values, and scientific meaning against the original figure before using it anywhere that matters.
PDF Chat provides source-linked responses, while Paper Insights supports structured, multi-paper analysis and exports for continued research work.
Writing, Citations and Research Management
Yes. ResearchPal helps structure an essay or outline, suggests headings, adjusts length, and pulls in citation support as you write, then continues a paragraph or section when you're stuck. It's built to support your writing process, not to replace the original thinking your work needs to stand on.
The editor's tools cover, right where you're already writing:
- Paraphrasing and summarisation
- Grammar and clarity improvements
- Making text shorter or longer
- Tone adjustment and translation
- Generating opposing arguments
- Continuing a paragraph and generating outlines
- Context-aware rewriting and citation assistance
Generate a citation from a paper title, DOI, URL, arXiv ID, or PubMed ID, in APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, or BibTeX format, complete with in-text citations. Edit the metadata if anything's off, switch styles instantly, and save or export references whenever you need them elsewhere.
Citations generate through several identifiers and export in multiple academic styles, complete with references, in-text citations, metadata, and source links.
Library and Integrations
Import a full folder or individual papers, and connect directly to Zotero and Mendeley. ResearchPal extracts available metadata automatically and saves references and abstracts, so imported papers are usable straight away across:
- Literature reviews
- Chat with PDF
- Paper Insights
- Citation management
- Library Chat
Projects can also be shared with collaborators where that's enabled.
Plans, Privacy and Accuracy
Free forever, no card needed.
Core agents, higher limits.
Top-tier limits, latest models.
Built for universities and teams.
Uploaded documents are processed to power the features you use — not to train ResearchPal's underlying AI models. You control deletion of documents and history, and access is protected with encryption and access controls. Still, treat AI-generated facts, summaries, quotations, and citations as a draft to verify, and follow your university's or publisher's policy on AI use in academic work.
Uploaded content is not used to train ResearchPal's AI systems. Document and history deletion controls are available, and you should always independently verify AI-generated outputs against institutional academic-integrity rules.
What Are You Trying to Accomplish?
Four common starting points into ResearchPal's toolkit.
Discover Research
- Search academic papers
- Find open-access studies
- Explore Connected Papers
- Save relevant sources
Understand Papers
- Chat with PDFs
- Extract Paper Insights
- Compare studies
- Analyse figures and visuals
Write and Cite
- Generate literature reviews
- Create essays and outlines
- Improve academic writing
- Generate and manage citations
Organise Your Work
- Build a research library
- Import Zotero or Mendeley
- Manage projects
- Share research where supported
Need ResearchPal for More Than One User?
Built for classrooms, labs, and engineering teams alike.
Universities
- Campus-wide access
- Academic database connections
- Student and faculty research tools
- Institutional onboarding
Research Teams and Labs
- Custom credit limits
- Volume licensing
- Unlimited or expanded projects
- Project-sharing features
- Custom deployment discussions
Developers
- ResearchPal API
- Literature-review endpoints
- Paper Insights & search
- Citation generation
- Writing and research endpoints
- MCP access where available
See How ResearchPal Works
Short, focused walkthroughs of each core workflow — no sign-up required to watch.
Still Have a Question?
Reach out about accounts, subscriptions, universities, teams, integrations, API access, or a technical issue — our team replies to every message.
Contact SupportReady to Make Research Easier?
Start by searching for a paper, uploading a PDF, creating a literature review, or generating your first citation — there's no single "right" place to begin.