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AI tools for academic writing are becoming valuable resources for students and researchers in producing high-quality, academically sound manuscripts. For early career researchers and students lacking prior training in research writing, these scientific tools act as great starting points. They can help generate initial drafts, suggest alternative phrasing, and even assist in creating entire sections of text.
Platforms like Paperpal are now offering whole research and writing suite, going beyond just basic grammar checks. They’re now helping with the whole research process – finding sources, summarizing them, and even creating citations. It’s like having a super-powered research assistant!
If you’re looking for the best AI tools for research writing, you’ve come to the right place. This article explores 5 leading AI writing assistants – Paperpal, Writefull, Wordvice, Wordwise.io, and QuillBot – listing their pros and cons, top features, and pricing models to help you make the right choice.
Disclaimer: This article is based on independent research and is intended to provide an unbiased comparison of various AI writing tools, including our own. While we strive to present accurate and up-to-date information, features, and pricing, we recommend checking directly with the respective companies for the latest details, as offerings may change over time. Additionally, any opinions expressed here reflect the author’s perspective and may not represent the official stance of the companies/tools discussed.
Paperpal
Paperpal is a comprehensive AI tool for academic writing that provides superior writing support, language editing, and submission-readiness checks to help authors produce high-quality scholarly content. This AI tool for research writing is perfect for students, researchers, medical professionals, science journalists, and others looking to achieve perfectly polished academic writing in half the time.
Paperpal’s AI is trained on millions of published scholarly content and backed by 22+ years of science, technical, and medical expertise, which enables it to analyze, understand, and provide context-specific suggestions to enhance academic text. Here’s a look at everything you get with Paperpal.
- Paperpal Text Suggestions: Tell Paperpal what to write by giving specific instructions, using pre-set prompts, or uploading your notes. The AI uses this to generate contextual text suggestions, summarize papers you are reading, expand on text to help you keep writing, create a strong literature review based on your notes, and much more.
- Language Checks: Polish your writing with Paperpal’s language and grammar checker, which identifies and corrects even complex errors in grammar, punctuation, and style while retaining technical terms, references, and equations.
- AI Reference Finder: Speed up your literature search and find reliable sources to support and strengthen your writing with Paperpal’s AI Reference Finder. Ask a research query and Paperpal will scour through 250M+ scholarly articles to provide science-backed answers with verified citations. Save relevant or interesting articles to the library for easy referencing later.
- Chat PDF: Make your research reading more efficient by selecting articles from the research repository or uploading any PDF to instantly extract key insights, analyze data, and summarize full-text PDFs in minutes.
- Citation Generator: Use the Cite feature to ensure accurate, consistent, and complete citations in your writing. Search by title or DOI and add the paper to your library, pick from 10,000+ citations styles, including APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE and more, and get perfectly formatted citations in minutes.
- Paraphrasing Support: Turn to Paperpal’s Rewrite to paraphrase your text as you want and as many times as you want to add variety in your writing and convey your message clearly while retaining the essence of the original text.
- Word Reduction: Rely on the Trim feature to instantly reduce your word count up to 25% without changing the meaning or context of your message.
- Make Academic: Make sure your sentence structure and tone aligns with stringent academic guidelines by transforming generic statements into a professional, academic tone in a click.
- Contextual Synonyms: Highlight a word and this AI tool for research writing fetches a list of relevant academic alternatives, ranked by their usage and context in previously published work.
- AI Review: Benefit from access to a virtual mentor, which offers real-time feedback and advice to improve your writing, helping you address gaps, perfect text, and submit with confidence.
- AI Translation: Get accurate, context-specific translations for 30+ languages, powered by DeepL, which preserves references, technical terms, and non-English words.
- Consistency Checks: Maintain a uniform style throughout your academic document by ensuring consistency in numbers, tables, figures, equation labels, word forms, spelling, and statistics.
- Plagiarism checker: Paperpal’s industry-best plagiarism checker evaluates your writing against 99B+ webpages to finds similar phrasing. Scan up to 7,000 words for free or buy a Prime plan to get a detailed report with similarity score, color-coded results, and side-by-side comparisons.
- Writing Templates: Overcome writer’s block and kickstart your writing with reliable generative-AI-powered outlines, titles, keywords, and more.
- Submission-readiness Checks: Get 30+ language and technical compliance pre-submission checks to boost your manuscript’s chance of acceptance.
Pros and Cons of Paperpal
| Pros | Cons |
| Trained in scholarly articles, Paperpal offers end-to-end writing support for essays, thesis, research papers, scientific documents, and more. | This core training means the AI writing tool may not work well for more generic formats, such as marketing copy, business-related docs, etc. |
| Paperpal serves as a comprehensive AI tool for academic writing with features to search, write, cite, chat with PDFs, edit and check drafts before submission all in one place. | Free plan allows users to explore all key features with usage limits; this may not meet the needs of users working on longer documents. |
| Paid plans come with full access to all advanced features, including access to an expert review by a human editor in your field | The range of advanced features on offer may require a learning curve for new users
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| Available on Web, MS Word, Chrome, Overleaf, and Google Docs | |
| Paperpal does not use your data to train its AI models, keeping your data completely confidential and 100% secure. This also ensures that your data is fully protected from any breaches, unauthorized access, and third-party sharing
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Paperpal Pricing Plans
Paperpal allows users to try the tool for free, with the free plan including:
- 200 language suggestions
- Unlimited citation generation in 10,000+ styles
- 7,000 words/month of plagiarism checks
- Free pre-submission check summary report
- 5 uses/day of Generative AI features which include Paraphrase, Trim, Make Academic, AI Reference Finder, Custom Text Suggestions with Paperpal Write, Translate, and AI Writing Templates
Users can unlock access to the entire toolkit by purchasing a Prime plan, choosing from three plans priced at $25/month, $55/quarter and $139/year. Paperpal also offers a Teams plan for larger groups starting at $107 for 2-5 members, and offers reduced pricing for users from lower purchasing power countries.
Writefull
Writefull is an AI tool for academic writing designed to help high-school students and researchers write and publish scientific texts in English. Writefull’s AI is trained on peer-reviewed Open Access articles across a variety of academic disciplines, enabling it to learn from real-world usage patterns rather than relying solely on grammatical rules.
Here are the top features of this AI tool for scientific writing:
- Language and comprehension: Writefull checks for spelling, grammar, vocabulary, and style issues in your academic writing, suggesting corrections for technical terms, grammar mistakes, awkward word combinations, and inappropriate or wordy language.
- Sentence Palette: Provides users with a collection of commonly used sentences and phrases in research and academic writing. This is organized by typical sections in research papers, like Abstract, Introduction, Literature, Methods, and Conclusion etc., to help users structure various sections of a research paper with ease.
- Paraphraser: Writefull can rewrite your text, to create a new version or avoid repetition, with context and meaning retained.
- Academizer: This transforms an informal sentence into a more professional, academic writing style, making it a good AI tool for dissertation writing.
- Ask AI: Integrated into Microsoft Word, the Ask AI feature functions as an academic assistant, providing reliable responses to queries. It offers insights, explanations, and suggestions directly within your document, eliminating the need to switch between applications.
- Change Style: Modifies the writing tone to suit different audiences or purposes. Options include making text more concise, punchy, or scientific, facilitating effective communication tailored to your target readership.
- Explain: Allows users to select a portion of text and click on Explain to get detailed clarifications, enhancing comprehension.
- Summarize: Condenses selected text into concise summaries useful in creating abstracts, introductions, or overviews faster.
- Split/Join: Writefull AI can split long sentences for clarity or join short ones for better flow, writing coherence, and improved readability.
- Synonyms in Context: Suggests alternative words or phrases with a suitability percentage, helping to choose the option that fit seamlessly within your sentence.
- Abstract Generator: Abstract generator identifies the key points in your text and generates an abstract.
- Title Generator: Creates contextual titles for essays, articles, research papers, blogs, etc.
- GPT Detector: Writefull claims to do a preliminary check for AI-generated content to help users avoid further AI detection.
Pros and Cons of Writefull
| Pros | Cons |
| Writefull is available as a Web Editor, compatible with MS Word and Overleaf | The tool’s capabilities are slow in Overleaf, resulting in longer wait times for updated text |
| Writefull’s AI proofreading and editing features save time in polishing content | Highly impractical for correcting mathematical expressions, as it frequently misinterprets them as regular text and corrects them |
| Writefull Revise and Cite are great features for students and researchers to proofread before submission, check for uncited text, and avoid unintentional plagiarism | These features are only available for institutions and not individual users |
| Basic features of Writefull like title & abstract generator, paraphraser, academizer, and GPT detector are available for free | Most of these features have a very low daily usage limit |
Writefull’s pricing plans
Writefull is priced at $7.21/month, $16.62/quarter and $30.75/year. Writefull also offers a free plan that includes a daily quota of all features. This allows users to test the AI writing tool and decide if they want to upgrade to a paid premium plan.
Wordvice
Wordvice is a comprehensive AI writing assistant and text editor that scriptwriters, marketers, students, and researchers use to edit drafts and improve the writing vocabulary and readability. This AI writing tool uses advanced natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) to provide users with instant revisions and suggestions for improving their writing.
Here are top tools available with Wordvice’s AI writing assistant:
- AI Proofreader: Identifies and corrects grammar, punctuation, spelling, and capitalization errors and provides feedback on vocabulary usage and style, helping users improve coherence in writing. The AI proofreader offers 4 different editing modes to suit various writing styles – Light, Standard, Intensive, and Concise.
- AI Paraphrasing Tool: Rephrases text to enhance clarity and prevent plagiarism by altering syntax and terminology while preserving the original meaning. It offers modes tailored for different contexts, including Academic and Creative.
- AI Translator: Provides translation for 30+ major language pairs including English to Chinese and vice versa, English to Spanish and vice versa.
- AI Summarizer: Condenses long blogs, essays, case studies, research papers, etc., into concise bullet points, capturing the main ideas without losing context.
- AI Plagiarism Checker: Detects source code plagiarism and content paraphrasing from published works in 100+ languages.
- AI Content Detector: Wordvice’s coverage for AI content detection includes ChatGPT and Gemini.
- Additional Proofreading Service: Wordvice also provides an extended proofreading and editing service based on a pay-per-use model, which employs professionally trained human editors to review and edit your documents. Users can upload their document, pay for the service, and get the edited version in 6-9 hours.
Pros and Cons of Wordvice
| Pros | Cons |
| Free plan allows you to try out most of the proofreading and translation features | The free plan doesn’t offer the plagiarism checker, and there’s a 5,000-word monthly limit for all other Wordvice features |
| Wordvice AI’s proofreading capabilities are great for academic and research writing | The free plan only allows access to Light and Standard modes |
| Provides English and cross-translations for more than 30 languages | Some of the AI-translated sentence patterns often turn out to be similar to those found on existing web pages, leading to accidental plagiarism |
| Available as a Web Editor and integrates with MS Word | MS Word’s load times are often slower, and tool lacks integration with Overleaf |
Wordvice AI pricing plans
Wordvice AI is priced at $19.95/month, $95.7/quarter, and $119.4/year. The basic plan provides limited access to AI Proofreader, Paraphraser, Summarizer and Translator, whereas the premium plan unlocks complete access to the free features and plagiarism checks and AI detection.
WriteWise
WriteWise.io is an AI-driven writing software specifically designed to assist academics in improving their writing quality and efficiency. This AI tool for academic writing allows you to automatically draft, use AI for peer review like inputs, select a journal, write a cover letter, and more.
Here’s a summary of the key features of this AI tool for research writing:
- Text Generation: WriteWise.io offers multiple widgets to generate research papers, cover letters, paraphrase and summarize text, etc., by suggesting relevant content and structure.
- Academic Phrasebank: Start writing from scratch with thousands of sentence templates to edit and structure research drafts.
- AI Peer Review: Get instant feedback on the structure, content, and presentation of any paper section.
- Journal Selector: Helps researchers find suitable journals for their work. Users can search for journals by subject, impact factor, and indexing status. The tool provides journal metrics, submission guidelines, and AI-powered recommendations to streamline the publication process.
- Bibliography Search: Helps researchers find relevant academic references via keywords, phrases, or author names. The tool also allows pasting full sentences for more precise searches.
- Grammar and Vocabulary Suggestions: Provides real-time grammar and vocabulary suggestions tailored to the scientific context to bring clarity to academic text.
- Plagiarism Checker: Ensures content originality by checking against existing web sources.
Pros and Cons of WriteWise
| Pros | Cons |
| Integrated tools for writing, bibliography management, and journal selection | Lacks the creativity, personality and nuance of human-written text |
| Supports simultaneous editing and commenting | Most writing assistance features require a paid subscription |
| Available only as a web editor. Lacks integration with MS Word or Overleaf |
WriteWise pricing plans
WriteWise.io doesn’t offer a free plan, but it provides a 5-day free demo allowing users to try out all the features before committing to a paid subscription. WriteWise’s monthly plan charged at $11.65 provides access to its library of academic prompts and templates. The annual plan charged at $95.88 also provides access to its course Academic Writing with ChatGPT along with its features.
QuillBot
QuillBot is an AI tool for academic writing that enhances writing clarity and quality by offering features like paraphrasing, grammar checking, summarizing, and citation generation. Its advanced NLP capabilities allow it to rephrase text effectively, making it a valuable tool for writers, students, and professionals looking to simplify complex sentences and improve readability.
Take a look at the key features of this AI tool for scientific writing:
- Paraphraser: QuillBot offers 8 pre-defined paraphrasing modes with in-built customization to change more (or less) of your writing.
- Grammar Checker: Instantly corrects grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors in US, UK, CA and AU English and other languages like German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese (Brazilian).
- Plagiarism Checker: Provides a plagiarism score and real-time analysis of improper attribution of authorship and citations for text scanned in 100+ languages.
- QuillBot Flow: This all-in-one word processor helps you research, take notes, and auto-complete sentences to write research papers faster.
- Summarizer: Quickly extracts key points and summarizes essays, papers, and documents in bullet points and paragraphs.
- Free Essay Checker: QuillBot’s AI-driven essay checker roots our lack of fluency, tricky plurals, repetitions, and other issues to help you write an A-grade essay.
- Free AI Content Detector: Flags AI-generated content with indications like repeated words, awkward phrases, and unnatural flow.
- Citation Generator: Offers free citation generation capabilities for APA, MLA, and Chicago style for full and in-text citations.
- Translator: QuillBot provides real-time text translation in 40+ languages.
Pros and Cons of QuillBot
| Pros | Cons |
| QuillBot has a minimal learning curve, making it easy to use | Features’ access with the free plan is quite low |
| Versatile paraphrasing tool, offering multiple options to reword content | Often creates incomprehensible sentences that needs human intervention to correct |
| Available as a Chrome and Edge extension, integrates with MS Word and Mac OS | Offers grammar corrections without providing specific explanations for the suggested changes |
QuillBot pricing plans
QuillBot is priced at $9.95/monthly, $39.95/semi-annual, and $49.95/year. The free plan provides access to a limited usage of Paraphraser, Summarizer, Standard & Fluency modes and Synonym suggestions.
That’s not all. There are multiple AI tools for academic writing which cater to several other use cases like literature search, academic proofreading, data extraction and a lot more. However, it’s important to use AI writing tools ethically and choose the best one based on your specific needs. We hope this detailed review of the top AI academic writing tools helps you choose the right AI writing assistant, which offers quick, accurate, and reliable support so you can achieve your writing goals faster.
Paperpal is a comprehensive AI writing toolkit that helps students and researchers achieve 2x the writing in half the time. It leverages 22+ years of STM experience and insights from millions of research articles to provide in-depth academic writing, language editing, and submission readiness support to help you write better, faster.
Get accurate academic translations, rewriting support, grammar checks, vocabulary suggestions, and generative AI assistance that delivers human precision at machine speed. Try for free or upgrade to Paperpal Prime starting at US$25 a month to access premium features, including consistency, plagiarism, and 30+ submission readiness checks to help you succeed.
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