What is Consensus AI?
October 27, 2025
Consensus is an AI search engine for academic research. It is an AI tool designed to search over 200 million scientific research papers and access automated summaries of research results. Bentley University has teamed up with Consensus to offer premium access to this research tool.
What Consensus is not.
Consensus is not a general purpose chatbot, like ChatGPT. It does not train its AI models on our data. The information you provide or search for is not used to improve their AI models or shared with third parties. Search data remains private and is anonymized. Most importantly, Consensus is not a substitute for searching library databases.
What does Consensus search?
- Semantic Scholar (a free AI search engine for academic papers)
- OpenAlex (a free database that “aims to index and connect the entirety of the global research system” with data from PubMed, Directory of Open Access Journals, ORCID, Crossref, etc.)
- Consensus’ crawl of the scholarly web to fill in important coverage gaps
How to access it:
For full access to our university-wide Consensus Unlimited Pro subscription, you will need to go to https://consensus.app/ and sign up using your @bentley.edu email address.
How it works
- search Consensus with keywords, open-ended questions, specific paper titles, or author names
- apply filters to the search, like publication year, study methodology, field of study, journal rank (Web of Science Journal Citation Reports), etc.
- Consensus AI searches the titles and abstracts and ranks the relevance of the top 20 papers (if more than 20 are found)
- Users can directly download full-text Open Access (OA) articles and papers through Consensus. For paywalled sources, Bentley users can use the citation from Consensus to retrieve articles from library databases or request articles via Interlibrary Loan.
- Consensus integrates with Zotero and Endnote citation managers
EXAMPLE
Enter a research question into the search box. For example: Does adding l-theanine to coffee improve focus?
The search returns the answer: Yes, adding L-theanine to coffee (caffeine) can improve focus and attention, especially during cognitively demanding tasks.
This conclusion is based on examining 20 scholarly sources across academic research databases. The sources are hyperlinked within the results. If the article is open access, the DOI will link to the full text. For articles not linked to the full text, users can search for the articles in the library’s subscription databases. If articles are not available, PDF copies can be requested through Bentley Interlibrary Loan.
Another feature of this AI App is the Consensus Meter. It creates a graphic image based on the analysis of the summaries of sources. It allows users to quickly understand the overall agreement or disagreement among the research for ‘yes/no’ questions.
The Consensus Meter shows strong support: 12 studies found L-theanine plus caffeine improves focus, while 2 studies disagreed.
What is Consensus best used for?
- Students doing literature reviews
- Researchers exploring new topics
- Journalists fact-checking claim
- Anyone wanting evidence-based answers to questions
The main benefit is Consensus saves time by letting you quickly understand what research says on a topic without manually reading dozens of papers. It's particularly useful for evidence-based questions where you want to see what the scientific consensus actually is.
Consensus is adding new features all the time. Check out The Consensus Blog to learn more about Medical Mode, Consensus Deep Search, and Threads.
For more information on how to use Consensus, check out Getting Started With Consensus University Access.