Paperpal Review: Features, Pricing, and How to Use

by Soundarya Durgumahanthi
length of a chapter

You’re probably here because you’ve searched for an honest Paperpal review to see if the hype about the AI writing assistant is real. As a busy student or researcher struggling with academic writing tasks, it’s important to not waste time on an AI writing tool that doesn’t understand academic text!  

We know the importance of choosing the right AI writing tool for academic writing, which is why we’ve put together a detailed Paperpal review that explains what Paperpal is, how to use it, and covers some frequently asked questions.  

What is Paperpal? 

Paperpal is a comprehensive AI writing assistant that provides superior writing support, language editing, and submission-readiness checks to help academics produce high-quality scholarly content in half the time.  

What sets Paperpal apart is its advanced AI, which is trained on published scholarly content and backed by 22+ years of science, technical, and medical expertise.  

This extensive training enables Paperpal’s AI to analyze, understand, and offer context-specific suggestions to enhance academic text. This means that you do not need to prompt the AI to “Act like an academic or journal editor”, Paperpal already does this for you!    

Who does Paperpal help?  

Paperpal is tailored to improve the academic writing experience for students, researchers, medical professionals, educators, science journalists, and others in academia. With reliable assistance at every step of the writing process, Paperpal helps you effortlessly enhance essays, assignments, thesis or dissertations, research papers, grant proposals, and more.  

  1. Students: Paperpal is perfect for students, from undergraduates to PhDs, struggling to jumpstart their writing and turn their raw notes into polished text. From AI text suggestions to in-depth language and grammar correction, it helps to boost efficiency, improve writing quality, leading to higher grades and fewer revision requests.   
  2. Researchers: Paperpal can help busy researchers save time in transforming complex data and theories into well-structured text. It can use your notes to co-create counterarguments or analogies, with an option to find verified references and add correct citations to further develop and strengthen your research argument.   
  3. Medical professionals and science journalists: Paperpal’s AI is trained on millions of articles and feedback from professional editors in the medical fields, allowing it to enhance text while ensuring inclusive language. This specialized training also allows Paperpal to provide precise, context-sensitive improvements with a focus on patient-first language. 
  4. Non-native English speakers: Paperpal helps academics with English as a second language express their ideas clearly as professional academic text. With contextual text suggestions, real-time translation, paraphrasing, word reduction, proofreading, and academic tone correction, Paperpal effortlessly helps you overcome language barriers. 

Join 1Mn+ academics who use Paperpal for academic writing. Try it for free today.

How does Paperpal work?   

Paperpal leverages 22+ years of scientific, technical, and medical expertise and combines it with advanced AI to provide users with reliable academic writing assistance. Its training dataset is made up of millions of scholarly articles and refined by feedback from top editors across 1,300+ subject areas based on over 2.5 million hours spent enhancing papers for publishing.  

Why should you choose Paperpal? 

Built for academics, Paperpal focuses on keeping your data secure and encouraging ethical AI use to empower you to write faster, without compromising ethical standards:  

  • Optimized Technology Mix for Tailored Support: Paperpal uses advanced AI technology and to assist with various writing tasks 
  • Pre-set Academic Features for Reliable Results: Eliminates the need for open prompt-writing with tools like ChatGPT to get desired outputs and saves time with pre-designed features that deliver relevant and accurate results 
  • In-Built Guardrails to Promote Integrity: Paperpal does not generate full text to avoid the over-reliance of AI outputs and empowers authors to have control over what they write 
  • Timely Reminders for Human Oversight: Paperpal constantly reminds authors to review and refine all AI outputs to produce the best, original academic writing 

What does Paperpal do?   

Paperpal is developed to provide support at every step of the academic writing journey, allowing you to ideate, write, search and cite, and even ensure submission readiness. This means you no longer have to switch multiple tabs or tools, with Paperpal, you get everything you need for high-quality academic writing in one place. This saves a significant amount of time, improving your productivity, and allowing you to focus on producing error-free content rather than the process.  

  1. Contextual suggestions to beat writer’s block: Tell Paperpal what to write and if necessary, upload relevant reference files. Paperpal Write will generate text based on your current input and any additional information you’ve provided. Extract key takeaways, draft a literature review, get writing ideas and more 
  2. Unlimited language suggestions for academic writing: Paperpal provides grammar suggestions based on scientific context and retains references, equations, technical terms, and non-English words while correcting grammar 
  3. Credible references from 250M+ scholarly articles: With Paperpal’s Research feature, get science-backed answers with verified citations to your research queries as you write. Save relevant articles to your citation library and refer to or cite them later 
  4. Accurate citations formatted in 10,000+ styles: Search for references using Paperpal’s Research feature or by title/DOI and create accurate in-text and full citations with a click. Available in APA, MLA, Chicago, AMA & more 
  5. Literature-validated synonym suggestions: Struggling with vocabulary? Just highlight a word, and Paperpal presents you with a list of relevant academic vocabulary alternatives, ranked by their usage and context      
  6. Instant feedback to improve your drafts: No matter what stage you’re at, Paperpal’s AI Review feature provides targeted advice to improve your writing and boost your confidence before submission 
  7. Precise translation for 30+ languages: Translate academic text to 30+ languages with Paperpal without changing technical terms. Paperpal context-specific translations adhere to patient-first language conventions, which is particularly important in fields such as medicine and psychology 
  8. Consistency checks for error-free writing: Paperpal’s consistency checks ensure style uniformity in the presentation of numbers, tables, figures, equation labels, word forms and spelling, and statistics 
  9. Best-in-class plagiarism checks: Paperpal collaborates with Turnitin to provide similarity checks for up to 7000 words for free. Paperpal plagiarism checker scans your paper for similarity and provides you with a detailed report with a similarity score that lets you address actionable items, cite overlooked sources, and avoid accidental plagiarism  
  10. Write 2x more in half the time: Paperpal Generative AI writing Templates help you get started with your writing via outlines, titles, abstracts, keywords and more. Get paraphrasing suggestions, trim text to reduce word count, and write professional emails in a click 
  11. Be Submission Ready – Get 30+ language and technical compliance pre-submission checks to boost your manuscript’s chance of acceptance

Generate outlines, paraphrase and refine academic text for clarity, tone, and length, or brainstorm with AI – all at one place.

How to use Paperpal?  

Paperpal is available to use on the Web and can also be easily integrated into MS Word. Here’s how you can access the AI academic writing assistant in each interface.  

Paperpal for Web

  • Step 1: Create your free Paperpal account to access the AI writing assistant 
  • Step 2: Copy and paste your text into the web editor 
  • Step 3: Before using, go to settings and specify your English preference (American or British) and editing mode (Extensive or Essential) 
  • Step 4: Paperpal will analyze your document and provide suggestions in the sidebar 
  • Step 5: Review and accept/reject the suggestions as needed 

Need a know-how to add Paperpal to Word, here’s a step-by-step process: 

Paperpal for Word

  • Step 1: Install the Paperpal Word add-in for your version of MS Word  
  • Step 2: Paperpal will appear in the sidebar as you write in Word 
  • Step 3: Before using, go to settings and specify your English preference (American or British) and editing mode (Extensive or Essential) 
  • Step 4: As you write, Paperpal will analyze your text and provide real-time suggestions in the sidebar 
  • Step 5: Review and accept/reject the suggestions with a single click 

Is Paperpal free to use?  

Paperpal offers a free version that provides valuable real-time writing assistance, making it an excellent choice for academics everywhere. Here’s what you can enjoy when you sign up for free 

  1. Language Correction: Get up to 200 language correction suggestions per month, ensuring your academic writing is error-free 
  2. Generative AI Features: Access Generative AI features like Rewrite, Research & Cite, Predictive Writing, Translate, and AI writing Templates up to 5 times a day to enhance your writing process 
  3. Citation Generation: Auto-generate unlimited citations in 10,000+ styles with Paperpal’s free version 
  4. Plagiarism Checks: Instantly scan up to 7,000 words/month against Turnitin’s database of 99 billion web pages for free 
  5. Submission Readiness Checks: Get a free summary report of 30+ language and technical checks that help you evaluate if your manuscript is ready to submit 

The feature-usage limits are reset every month, so you continue receiving assistance for your ongoing or new projects.  

Paperpal’s Prime plan provides unlimited access to all features, plus additional functionalities. Here’s what users can get with Paperpal Prime 

  • Unlimited language corrections paired with consistency checks 
  • Unrestricted per day use of Generative AI features like Rewrite, Research, Translate, Predictive Writing etc.  
  • Save references to citation library as you generate citations 
  • Scan 10,000 words/month for plagiarism and get a detailed report  
  • Receive a meticulously edited manuscript that has passed all journal submission checks, ensuring a confident submission 

 Upgrade here for unlimited writing support.  

Is Paperpal better than Grammarly? 

Grammarly is a great AI writing tool for general purposes and comes in handy when you’re writing marketing ad copies, articles, emails, etc. However, Grammarly’s coverage of errors and language suggestions for academic text is low.  

Fig 1: Grammarly replaces “administered” with “added” even though the previous term works better with chemotherapy. It also fails to understand technical terminology, reflected in correcting “Kaplan-Meyer” to “Kaplan-Meier”

This was first evaluated in the 2022 whitepaper by the University of Cambridge titled ‘Comparison of Automated English Editing Tools,’ which found Paperpal to be the most appealing writing and editing tool for researchers. Editage’s senior editors from the training department later conducted a blinded benchmarking analysis in October 2023, where they evaluated Paperpal vs. Grammarly (Academic Mode) and three other AI tools.

In the Grammarly and Paperpal review, Editage experts identified Grammarly does not understand technical terminology and fails to correct specific word choices used in scientific writing.  

Paperpal also provided the highest number of suggested edits, over 2x than Grammarly (Academic mode). There were no issues in terms of comprehension and integrity, in documents edited by Paperpal, whereas Grammarly (Academic Mode) had the most incorrect suggestions across all categories in the analysis, which led to frustrating authors.   

Is Paperpal better than ChatGPT? 

ChatGPT is useful for generating various text formats, translating languages, and answering queries informatively. However, it has significant drawbacks in academic writing and research domain. The major reasons why academics prefer Paperpal over ChatGPT include  

  • Paperpal’s pre-set academic features that eliminate the need for extensive prompt writing  
  • Avoiding unintentional plagiarism 
  • Lack of ChatGPT’s academic expertise 
  • Source reliability, language precision, and AI hallucination 

Paperpal, excels in academic writing, with features designed to meet the stringent linguistic and formatting standards required for scholarly publication.  

Done with the in-depth Paperpal review? Try it for free.

This Paperpal review shows how Paperpal’s domain expertise, focus on using AI ethically to avoid plagiarism concerns, top-tier security infrastructure makes it the ultimate tool for research and academic writing. Whether you’re a student, researcher, medical practitioner, or an academic, try Paperpal now and experience the difference.

Frequently Asked Questions

How accurate is Paperpal’s grammar checker?

Paperpal’s AI is extensively trained on millions of academic texts across 1,300+ fields of study and backed by 22+ years of science, technical, and medical expertise. This enables Paperpal to quickly scan and flag even complex language and grammar errors in academic texts.  Paperpal not only detects errors in spelling and punctuation, but also flags inconsistencies in hyphenation, numerical and statistical presentation, academic tone and language and promotes usage of inclusive or patient-first language for scientific writing.  Compared to other AI writing tools, Paperpal provides 3x more suggestions and performs the best when it comes to improving academic language, ensuring reader comprehension, and helping you uphold academic integrity in your writing. 

How much does Paperpal cost?

Paperpal offers 3 pricing plans – Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual, priced at $25/month, $55/quarter and $139/year respectively. Paperpal also offers a Teams plan for larger groups starting at $107 for 2-5 members.  

Can Paperpal detect plagiarism?

Yes, Paperpal in partnership with Turnitin provides a plagiarism checker which scans academic text against Turnitin’s database of 100 billion webpages and provides a similarity score matched with original sources. Users can scan up to 7000 words/month for free, upgrade to prime to unlock 10,000 words or buy additional words. 

Is Paperpal suitable for non-academic writing?

While Paperpal is built for academics, it can be used by anyone to create more professional sounding content. It is ideally suited for academic writing but can also be used by science journalists and media professionals writing about new research 

How do I create an account with Paperpal?

Click here to create your account with Paperpal for free. If you’re already a free user, click here to upgrade to Paperpal Prime.  

Does Paperpal offer customer support?

Yes, Paperpal offers customer support to assist users with their inquiries and issues. Users can access the Paperpal Help Center, for solutions related to the platform's features, billing, and usage. Additionally, users can email to hello@paperpal.com for more specific support needs  

Does Paperpal integrate with other writing tools or platforms?

Paperpal is available as a Web Editor and integrates with MS Word. Overleaf integration with Paperpal is coming soon 

Is Paperpal suitable for students?

Paperpal is great for students writing essays, thesis, dissertations, case studies and more. Paperpal helps students as an assistant throughout their writing journey. Students can use Paperpal to overcome writer’s block, make language edits, check for unintended plagiarism before submissions.  

What makes Paperpal different from other writing assistants?

Unlike other AI tools, Paperpal does not use your data to train its AI models. Users own copyright related to all content produced using Paperpal. Your data used for Paperpal Generative AI features and language checks, do not leave the Paperpal servers. 

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