Consensus

What Consensus does

Consensus searches academic literature and answers a question with findings drawn from papers rather than from web pages. For yes-or-no research questions it shows a meter summarising how many of the retrieved studies support, oppose or are unclear on the claim, alongside each paper's finding in one line with study type and citation count. That format makes it fast to see whether a claim is well supported or rests on a single small study. It also produces longer syntheses and supports filtering by study design, sample size and publication year. It suits clinicians, journalists, students and anyone checking a health or science claim. The limitations are subtlety and scope: the consensus meter compresses genuine scientific disagreement into a simple picture, it cannot judge study quality the way a trained reviewer would, and coverage is strongest in medicine and social science.

How to use it

Use consensus.app without an account for a limited number of searches; signing up and subscribing raises limits and unlocks the longer synthesis features. Ask a specific empirical question, such as whether a particular intervention affects a particular outcome, because vague or non-empirical questions produce weak results. Read the individual paper findings rather than stopping at the summary meter, and use the filters for study design and sample size to separate a large randomised trial from a small observational study, which the meter treats more equally than a reviewer would. Follow the link to each paper for anything you intend to cite. It works well as a first pass before a proper review in a dedicated tool. Two practical notes: coverage is strongest in medical and social sciences and thinner in engineering and humanities, and free search limits reset monthly rather than daily. For anything clinical, confirm findings against a guideline or a systematic review rather than relying on a set of individual studies.

Best for

• checking health claims
• quick evidence scans
• study design filtering
• science journalism
• pre-review searches

Strengths and limitations