What is Scispace? Detailed Review of Features, Pricing, and Alternatives

A literature review involves extensive reading, organizing, summarizing, and synthesizing various texts. While this process can be daunting, modern tools like SciSpace can significantly streamline it. This article explores how SciSpace’s versatile features can save you time and effort when conducting thorough literature reviews, help in academic writing and citation management. It also explores SciSpace alternatives like Paperpal to help you choose the best tool for your research.   

What is SciSpace?

SciSpace is an AI-powered platform that helps academics manage, write and publish their work more efficiently. The SciSpace AI research assistant can simplify the literature search and review process by helping you find research papers based on topics or user queries and extracting key insights from PDFs. In addition to this, SciSpace also has an AI writer, citation generator, paraphraser, and AI detector to help streamline your academic writing. 

SciSpace: Top Features

SciSpace has a number of useful features tailored to help academics enhance key steps in the research journey. Here’s a look at its top features 

Chat with PDF: SciSpace AI’s popular Chat with PDF feature offers precise answers directly sourced from specific sections of your document, complete with citations. Whether you need a concise overview, detailed explanations, or recommendations for related research based on highlighted text, SciSpace AI can deliver these insights with a single click. Finally, the note-taking feature allows you to capture and organize key insights from your readings, enhancing your learning and research experience. 

SciSpace Literature Review: This SciSpace AI Assistant answers your research questions by drawing from a vast database of 200+ million relevant research papers. The answers are presented in a clear, tabular format, highlighting the source of the information. You can easily filter the results based on criteria like PDF availability and journal ranking. 

For a more customized review experience, SciSpace Literature Review offers additional data such as TL; DR summaries, summarized introductions and conclusions, methods, abstracts, and limitations. This allows you to tailor your results as per your specific needs. 

Fig 1: SciSpace literature review tool shows papers with insights and smart filters 

Extract Data: This feature enables users to upload their own PDFs and select the specific data points they wish to extract, e.g., conclusions. It allows you to compare multiple PDFs by presenting extracted data in a tabular format. Once extracted, this information is then seamlessly integrated into the user’s personal library. 

Find Topics: Another interesting feature, this allows you to ask a question and SciSpace AI scours through its database of 285M research papers to generate answers backed with citations. The answer is then presented as a summary, and its key elements are further explained below with the sources.  

AI Writer: Much like other SciSpace alternatives like Jenni, the AI Writer tool helps authors by automatically suggesting text to complete your thoughts and keep your writing flowing. However, SciSpace takes this a step further by offering relevant citation suggestions and automatically updating your reference list in real time as you write. Users can conveniently access the SciSpace database to verify references and assess their suitability for citation. 

SciSpace Paraphraser: With 20+ preset tones to paraphrase your writing in, it beats other popular SciSpace alternatives like QuillBot, which offers only 8 tones. Users can fine-tune the paraphrased text by adjusting its length and variation to achieve optimal results. 

Citation Generator: SciSpace generates in-text and reference citations in 9,000+ styles and allows users to save and export the output as BibTeX and Clipboard files.  

SciSpace AI Detector: One of the key features is the AI detector, which instantly identifies AI-generated text and provides a comprehensive report on the whole document, as well as on a sentence level, highlighting what and how much of the text is written using AI tools.  

PDF to Video: The SciSpace AI assistant goes beyond the traditional written format by empowering you to explain the significance of your work through video abstracts. Share these engaging videos on social media to increase visibility, attract a wider audience, and boost the potential for citations.   

SciSpace Pros & Cons

An important aspect of our SciSpace AI review is outlining the pros and cons of the AI research assistant and suggesting a possible SciSpace alternative. Take a look! 

SciSpace Pros

• SciSpace Literature Review: Accelerates the literature search and review process with detailed insights and customizable filter options like TL; DR, summaries, etc.
• SciSpace AI Assistance: Offers real-time explanations for text, mathematical equations, and tables, a feature not commonly found in SciSpace alternatives.
• Ease of Use: The SciSpace AI platform and tools are fairly simple to use for literature review, writing, and formatting processes.

SciSpace Cons

• No Integration with MS Word: SciSpace doesn’t work with MS Word and converting text to Word documents often leads to distorted equations and incorrect references, requiring significant manual adjustments.
• Limited Free Features: SciSpace may not be the best option for budget-conscious users because its advanced features offer limited access. For example, unlike popular SciSpace alternatives like Paperpal, which offers unlimited citation generation for free, SciSpace limits the number of citations that can be generated in the free version.
• Limited Software Functionality: Table editing tools are limited in functionality, so not ideal for large data sets. As data/document size increases, the software’s performance can degrade, leading to issues like incorrect references and unusual symbols.
• Inadequate Customer Service: There have been user complaints online about the lack of prompt communication and delayed responses from SciSpace to user inquiries.

Paperpal stands out as the perfect SciSpace alternative

When looking for SciSpace alternatives, you cannot go wrong with Paperpal, an AI research writing assistant that streamlines every step of the academic writing process. Based on 22+ years of expertise in scholarly publishing, trained on millions of research articles, and built to replicate human editing, Paperpal is the perfect partner for students, researchers, and academics. The 100% secure tool provides instant checks, feedback, and suggestions that help you save time, write better, and perfect your academic writing in half the time.  

Paperpal’s comprehensive toolkit is what makes it the perfect SciSpace alternative. The trusted AI assistant offers support with literature search and review, accurate citations, translation, academic writing and paraphrasing, complete editing checks, AI review of text, plagiarism detection, and pre-submission checks – all in one place. This allows academics to enjoy an uninterrupted writing flow, without the need to switch between multiple tools. Paperpal’s seamless integration with MS Word, Web, and Overleaf further enhances productivity.  

Paperpal: Top Features

• Reference Finder: Paperpal’s research assistant scans its growing repository of 250M+ research articles, spanning all key disciplines, to provide users with factual answers/insights along with verified citations. This feature is invaluable when you need to verify ideas as you write or find references to support your arguments
• Chat PDF: This newly launched feature allows users to instantly extract insights, summarize, and analyze the content of full-text PDFs. Paperpal’s Chat PDF makes it easy to go from research to insights in minutes, saving hours of time in the literature review process
• Citation Generator: Generate complete, correctly formatted citations in 10,000+ styles, including the updated editions of APA, MLA, Chicago, AMA, and IEEE styles. Simply save relevant articles to your Citation Library and cite as you write. Users also have the option to switch citation styles across the document in a click
• AI Writing Templates: If you need a starting point for your essay, research paper or thesis, Paperpal’s Templates feature can help you with structured AI outlines, titles, abstracts, keywords, and much more.
• Complete Writing Assistance: Paperpal can help you overcome writer’s block by turning your ideas into written text faster than ever. Simply upload your notes and tell Paperpal what to write, use our pre-set prompts or add custom instructions for the AI. Paperpal’s Write feature can instantly analyze, understand, and generate text suggestions that help you expand on ideas, identify fresh perspectives or get counterarguments, draft a literature review, generate examples, and ensure you keep writing
• Language Suggestions: Paperpal accurately corrects language, and grammar errors and suggests appropriate vocabulary for your academic writing. Depending on their English proficiency, users can choose between the “Extensive” editing mode for in-depth suggestions or the “Essential” editing mode for more targeted corrections
• Plagiarism Checker: Paperpal’s best-in-class plagiarism checker scans your text against an extensive database of 99B+ webpages and generates a detailed report, with a similarity score and color-coded results. This helps you quickly assess and address red flags, cite overlooked sources, and prevent accidental plagiarism
• Academic Translation: Paperpal Translate, powered by DeepL, provides accurate translation for academic text across 30+ top language pairs, while retaining context and preserving technical terms. This lets you write in your own language, translate and refine your work in English, and then convert it back to your preferred language to check before final submission. This reverse translation option makes Paperpal a reliable online translator for non-native English-speaking academics
• Consistency Checks: Paperpal ensures style uniformity in numbers, tables, figures, equation labels, word forms, spelling, and statistics. By automating tedious manual checks and providing a simple click-and-fix solution, Paperpal saves researchers time and effort
• Be Submission Ready: Paperpal offers 3 types of language and technical pre-submission checks, apart from plagiarism checks, to ensure your manuscript is perfectly polished and ready to submit, increasing its chances of acceptance.
  • Journal Submission Checks: Provides 30+ language and technical compliance pre-submission checks for your manuscript to reduce the risk of desk rejection.
  • AI Review: Offers instant, targeted advice on your draft to identify logical gaps and improve flow and readability before submission.
  • Human Editing Check: Access editing services by editing experts, who review your manuscript to enhance quality, ensuring it meets high academic standards required for publication in high-impact journals.

Paperpal vs SciSpace: Features and Pricing

Feature	Paperpal	SciSpace
Most Useful for	Academic Writing, Editing, Literature Search, and Submission Readiness	Literature Search and Review, Academic Writing
Language Suggestions	Corrects language and grammar errors while preserving technical terms in academic text	Corrects spellings and improves overall clarity; may suggest unnecessary changes for technical text
Writing Assistance	Context-appropriate writing suggestions based on pre-set/custom prompts, with file upload option for more tailored results.	Autocompletes text to help convey your ideas faster
Reference Finder (Search for Research Papers)	Provides science-backed answers from 250M+ research articles with verified link as you write	Provides factual answers with source links from 200M+ research articles
Citation Generator	Allows to find, generate, and cite papers in 10,000+ citation styles for free	Allows citation generation in 9,000 styles; limited free use
Chat PDF	Offers unlimited free Chat PDF interactions; users can search/upload PDFs and get insights with source links, summarize, reference in writing with citations, and find related papers	Provides a Chat with PDF feature that lets users extract details, summarize text, get explanations for complex concepts, and compare multiple PDFs
Instant AI Review	Get detailed feedback on your essays, research papers, and reports instantly with Paperpal	Not available
Rewrite, Paraphrase, Shorten text	Paraphrases effectively, trims word length up to 25%, and ensures an academic tone all while retaining the context and original meaning	Provides 20+ modes of paraphrasing and offers length and variation customizations
Online Translation	Supports real-time translation for 30+ top language pairs	Supports translation for 75+ languages
Contextual Synonyms	Improves word choice by offering relevant synonyms, ranked by its usage in published literature	Not available
Consistency Checks	Flags inconsistencies in word usage, spelling, numbers, statistics, equations	Not available
Plagiarism Checker	Scans academic text against 99 billion webpages to identify similar phrasing	Plagiarism checker not available; instead offers an AI detection tool
Templates & Outlines	Generates AI outlines, abstracts, keywords, titles, summaries, emails, etc.	Offers limited preset templates, needs prompts to get the desired results
Platform Integrations	Web, MS Word, Overleaf, Google Docs (coming soon)	Web, Chrome extension, GPT plug-in
Pricing	Free version available, with paid plans starting at: US$25/month US$55/quarter and US$139/ year	Free version available with limited features, prices start at US$144/year

SciSpace Review: The Final Verdict

Based on the details presented above, it’s clear that SciSpace is a versatile AI tool for academics; it is especially useful to streamline your literature reviews. However, Paperpal presents a compelling SciSpace alternative. It has the same set of features to support your literature search and review, Chat with PDFs, and cite accurately, but provides broader, deeper set of tools and checks to enhance your academic writing process, streamline your editing, and ensure submission readiness.  

SciSpace excels in literature review and research management, but Paperpal effortlessly handles every step of the writing journey, from ideation to literature review, academic writing and editing to key plagiarism detection and pre-submission checks, and so much more. With everything in one place, you not only save time but also get more bang for your buck. Add to this Paperpal’s easy-to-use interface and academic focus and it’s easy to see why it is a strong choice for those looking for a viable, better SciSpace alternative.  

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