Discover a New Way to Research: Try Consensus
The UST Libraries are thrilled to be trialing Consensus for the 2025-26 academic year. Consensus is an innovative AI-powered search engine designed to provide many of the features people like about using AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity for research, but with a focus on academic literature rather than web searching. Consensus offers a conversational, synthesis-oriented way to surface and summarize academic sources in the early stages of a literature review.
What Sets Consensus Apart from Traditional Databases?
AI-Powered Summaries Rooted in Real Research
Conesus deploys AI only after searching academic literature, eliminating the problem many AI-driven tools have with hallucinating sources or pulling non-academic sources into its summaries. Consensus’ results are based directly on a corpus of over 200 million academic papers and book chapters.
In addition to surfacing the sources most relevant to your question, Consensus provides instant, AI-generated summaries that help you quickly get an overview of multiple papers, complete with clear citations. Every insight is traceable back to its source, allowing you to quickly go upstream and confirm critical information in its original sources. Integration with the library’s full text subscriptions allows you to often get to the full text of articles with just one click.
Smarter Search that Leverages AI to Better Understand Your Question
Traditional tools rely heavily on exact keyword matches, which can sometimes be frustrating if you are too new to a topic to know the best search phrases to try. Consensus combines semantic AI embeddings with classic keyword searching to understand your intent, and then blends that with metrics like citation counts, recency, and journal reputation to surface the most relevant results. In other words, Consensus will interpret your input to provide results regardless of whether you use simple keyword searches, natural language questions, or advanced, engineered prompts with specific output requests. Consensus will interpret and provide results for any of the following sample inputs:
- Vaccines
- antidepre
- Effects of ability grouping on academic outcomes
- Does creatine improve cognitive function in healthy adults?
- Summarize the pros and cons of carbon taxes in bullet points
Interactive Tools that Give Quick Insight
Consensus includes a variety of powerful AI features:
- Pro Analysis synthesizes findings across multiple papers, allowing you quickly get an overview of what the academic literature returned by your search says.
- Consensus Meter helps users visualize how studies answer “Yes/No” research questions by grouping them according to whether they support or contradict the question asked (e.g., do studies answer, “yes”, “no”, or “uncertain” to the research question, “Are antidepressants more effective than placebo or psychotherapy?”).
- Study Snapshot gives a short, quick summary of an individual paper to help support quick scanning of results for relevance
- Ask Paper lets you chat directly with a paper’s full text for deeper clarity on methods or findings.
- Deep Search mode is a research agent that conducts literature review-style searches of Consensus’ 200M+ article corpus, similar to deep research modes other AI tools use to do web research.
What is Its Subject Area Coverage?
While Consensus’ corpus of academic documents does have coverage in most disciplines and is worth trying, especially for multidisciplinary research, it is more robust in some areas than in others. It tends to shine in the sciences (particularly the health sciences) and be a bit more hit-and-miss in the humanities.
How Do I Get Started?
Thanks to our site-wide license, anyone with a UST university email can sign up to get access to the premium version of Consensus with all of its advanced tools and features is available free for the entire 2025–26 academic year.
Navigate to Consensus, find the “Sign Up” link in the upper right corner of the page, and use your stthomas.edu email address to create your account. After you have signed up, be sure to go into Settings in your account and set “University of St. Thomas” as your institution. This will connect your Consensus account to the UST Libraries’ subscriptions so you can access the full text of articles that we have in our collections.
We Want Your Feedback!
Throughout the trial the libraries would love to hear any feedback you are willing to provide. Please use our Consensus Trial Feedback Form to let us know what you think of the tool and whether or not the libraries should continue to provide access to it.
