About PaperFinder
PaperFinder is a completely free research-discovery tool that helps students, researchers and the simply curious search the world's scholarly knowledge from one place — and actually understand it. One search reaches papers, patents, theses, datasets and code across many trusted sources, finds the best legitimate full text, and (with your own AI key) explains it in plain language.
Why we built it
Finding research is unnecessarily hard. Knowledge is scattered across dozens of databases, the best free copy of a paper is often hidden behind a paywall you don't need to hit, and dense academic writing takes hours to work through. Most tools that fix part of this cost money, gate features behind an account, or quietly harvest your data.
PaperFinder was built as the opposite of that: open the site, search, find useful research, understand it, follow the trail to related work, reach the legitimate full text, and leave — with no login, no subscription and no wall. It should be useful even if you visit only once.
Who it's for
Kick-start a literature review, understand a hard paper quickly, and cite it correctly — without a university subscription.
Scan the field fast, track citations and related work, compare methods and spot gaps worth pursuing.
Explore real science behind the headlines, in your own language, from anywhere in the world.
How it works
- 1Search across many sources at once
Your query fans out to open scholarly sources — OpenAlex, arXiv, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, Crossref, GitHub and more — and the results are merged, de-duplicated and ranked into one clean list. You can also paste a DOI, arXiv ID or a publisher link and jump straight to the exact record.
- 2Find the best legal full text
For each paper we resolve the DOI, identify the publisher and look for a legitimate way to read it — an authorized open-access version, a repository copy, a preprint or an author manuscript — and show you the best available option, clearly labelled.
- 3Understand it with AI (optional)
Ask for a Quick Summary and get the paper's problem, method, results and limitations at a glance, plus deeper paper intelligence when the full text is available. AI is strictly bring-your-own-key, so it's free to the project and private to you.
- 4Follow the research & keep what matters
Explore similar papers, citations, authors and institutions; compare papers side by side; find research gaps; generate citations; and save anything to a local library that lives in your browser — no account needed.
What's inside
Problem, method, results and limitations — grounded in the actual paper, never invented.
Legitimate free copies surfaced automatically, with honest access badges.
Line up 2–5 papers on problem, method, dataset, results and more.
Point AI at a set of papers and surface recurring limitations and open questions.
APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX and RIS from structured metadata, plus bulk export.
Save on-device and read summaries in your language.
Our principles
- Free, forever. No paid tier, no subscription, no mandatory account.
- Legitimate access only. We link to and discover legally available copies. We never bypass paywalls, authentication or copyright, and we never host copyrighted files.
- Your data stays yours. Preferences, your library and any AI keys live in your browser — not on our servers.
- AI that's honest. Summaries are machine-generated and clearly marked — always verify against the original.
- Minimal, non-intrusive ads. Only to help cover hosting and infrastructure — never popups, never disguised as results.
Where data comes from
PaperFinder is a discovery layer on top of trusted public scholarly infrastructure, including OpenAlex, Crossref, arXiv, PubMed / PMC, Semantic Scholar, Unpaywall, DOAJ, GitHub, PatentsView. Each source has its own terms; rights to the underlying works stay with their authors and publishers, and access is always through the original, legitimate source.