Paperguide Reviews

As a part-time Master’s student juggling work and other responsibilities, I recently purchased the lifetime deal for Paperguide, hoping it would streamline my research process and save time. After using it for a while, I’ve found a lot to like, but there are also areas where it could be improved.

The Positives:
Paperguide has several features that make it a helpful companion for research and writing:
- Ease of Use: The platform is user-friendly and relatively intuitive, even for beginners.
- PDF Chat and Summarisation: These features are fantastic. The ability to upload papers, have key sections summarised, and interact with PDFs through AI chat saves a lot of time and helps focus on critical insights.
- Centralised Reference Management: The tool allows users to gather references in one place by uploading files or importing from other reference managers, which is very convenient during the research phase.
- Time-Saving AI Tools: Paperguide’s AI tools for generating outlines, summarising papers, and organising thoughts are efficient and help cut through tedious tasks.

The Drawbacks:
Despite its strengths, there are two notable issues that impact its utility for academic purposes:
- No Bibliography Export: While you can gather references in one place within Paperguide, the inability to download or copy a properly formatted bibliography is a significant drawback. Academic writing requires a bibliography, and having to manually reformat references outside the tool adds unnecessary steps.
- Questionable Paper Credibility: The papers retrieved through Paperguide require close scrutiny. While this isn’t necessarily Paperguide’s fault, the sources it pulls from sometimes include papers that are mislabelled as academic or even use fake DOIs. Users need to verify every source to ensure its legitimacy, which can undermine the time-saving aspect of the tool.

Overall Impression:
Paperguide is a promising tool with clear potential to become an essential academic research assistant. Its current features are helpful and user-friendly, and it could tremendously support students and researchers if the development team continues to refine the platform. However, the inability to export a bibliography and the need to double-check paper authenticity are significant issues that should be addressed.

For now, I’d give Paperguide 3 tacos out of 5. It’s a good start, but there’s room for improvement before it becomes a must-have for academic users.

For context, I only wanted this product for medical-related research and writing. I found the UI to be very unintuitive compared to comparable products like Consensus and SciSpace. I also found the results to be pretty sparse. As for the AI writer, I guess I misunderstood how it worked. I thought I could choose several research papers and then prompt the app to write a paper for me...not the case (or at least I couldn't figure out how to do it). Nice idea but other apps do it better. Gonna have to get a refund. 2 Tacos for effort....

I purchased the app and thought I would try it out on a Corrective Action Plan I was working on. Although I had a good bit of the report completed, I started out asking Paperguide to write an outline. I was very impressed with the outline recommended by Paperguide and even tweaked my existing outline with some of its suggestions.

Then, I uploaded all of my existing references and began having Paperguide write a few specific sections and found that it did an outstanding job at writing in my voice and properly citing references from both my uploaded documents and other reference material it found applicable on the internet.

I expected to have to correct errors and hallucinations and do a significant amount of wordsmithing, but there was not a single technical error in the content Paperguide produced. Of the total 40-page report, Paperguide probably generated 20% of the content since I had already been working on the report prior to using Paperguide. I only made minor edits to the content it prepared.

If the Appsumo deal comes back, I can't recommend it any higher based on my experience.

I could not figure out how to fell Papergiide to help me write a paper with the 30 references o have it… unless there is an instruction manual somewhere I do not foresee using it much.

Complete feature
Excellent development and roadmap
Multi user available
Export to Excel
Hopefully will matching features on Afforai and Notebook...