Getting Started with SciSpace: A Complete Step-by-Step Walkthrough for Researchers

SciSpace positions itself as an AI research platform built specifically for scientific workflows—using academic papers as the only source of answers, then attaching citations so researchers can verify claims. The core promise is speed without sacrificing traceability: instead of relying on general-purpose LLMs that may draw from blogs, forums, and personal opinions, SciSpace is trained on research literature and built around a continuously expanding database of roughly 300 million papers.

The platform is organized around the research life cycle, from defining questions and finding relevant papers to analyzing, storing, and ultimately drafting publishable writing. Rather than treating research as a single chat session, SciSpace offers dedicated tools for each step, with the most time spent on a guided walkthrough of its core features. Users start with Literature Review, which returns instantly ranked paper results for a query and provides an overall synthesis based on the top papers—complete with citations. Literature Review also supports side-by-side comparison through a table-like interface where users can add custom columns (for example, “methods” or other fields) and compare papers on those dimensions to decide what to read in depth.

Literature Review comes in three modes: Standard, High Quality, and Deep Review. Standard and High Quality differ mainly in the quality and structure of the generated insights and explanations, including how well added comparison columns are interpreted. Deep Review changes the workflow more dramatically. It begins by asking follow-up questions to clarify the scope (such as which ecosystems or habitats matter), then generates multiple search queries in parallel. Those queries expand the paper set substantially—on one example, the system moved from a handful of top results to hundreds of papers (around 830)—and incorporates citations and references while searching, aiming for a more comprehensive evidence base.

After paper discovery, SciSpace’s Copilot (chat with PDF) supports deep reading. It can answer questions about a selected paper by scanning the PDF and responding section-by-section; if a PDF is missing, it can still respond using available metadata such as abstracts and references. Users can also upload their own PDFs into “My Library” and chat with them, with the same kinds of summary and paper-level options available.

For writing, AI Writer helps users draft research articles using templates and an assistive editing model: it generates outlines and can write sections, but it’s designed to support user input rather than simply outputting a full essay automatically. It also integrates citation insertion from SciSpace’s sources or from papers saved in the library, and supports exporting the draft to DOCX and writing in different languages.

Beyond these core tools, SciSpace adds research-oriented utilities: a Paraphraser tailored for academic writing with options for tone/style, length, variation, and language; a Citation Generator that produces both main and in-text citations from natural-language details or URLs; and an AI Detector that flags likely AI-written passages with a color-coded breakdown and an overall score.

The newest centerpiece is SciSpace AI Agent, designed to chain multiple tasks in one run. In a demonstrated workflow, it searched for papers, summarized top results using Copilot-style steps, drafted an academic essay in LaTeX via AI Writer, and generated a research poster—taking roughly 5–10 minutes for the full execution. Finally, SciSpace offers three pricing tiers (Basic free, Premium around $20, and an Advanced tier around $90) with credits that primarily govern AI Agent usage, while other tools become unlimited at higher tiers. For newcomers, the recommended path is Literature Review first, then Copilot, then AI Writer, and finally the AI Agent for end-to-end research tasks.