To use Consensus.app, begin by submitting your query into the search engine. Consensus operates by searching a vast corpus of over 200 million academic papers, including peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, and preprints, aggregated from sources like Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, and its own scholarly web crawl. When you submit a query, Consensus first retrieves the most relevant academic papers using a hybrid approach of AI-powered semantic search and traditional keyword methods. After retrieving the top results, Consensus's AI analyzes these papers to generate a clear, cohesive synthesis of the findings. Every insight provided is directly linked back to its original source through citations, ensuring that all generated content is evidence-based and traceable. This process mitigates the risk of hallucinations often associated with general-purpose AI models. Consensus emphasizes responsible AI use, committing to ethical and transparent practices by only employing AI after searching the scientific literature and never using user data to train its models. To refine your search and get more precise results, utilize the Search Filters. These advanced filters allow you to narrow down your search based on criteria such as journal quality, publication date, study design, study type, location, citation count, and sample size. For yes/no research questions, the Consensus Meter provides an instant visualization of the level of agreement or disagreement across the scientific literature. It analyzes the top 20 relevant papers to give you a quick overview of the scientific consensus. As you discover valuable research, you can organize and save your search results and individual papers into custom collections using the My Library / Save Papers feature for easy access and management. To delve deeper into a topic, use Threads. This feature allows you to ask follow-up questions, transforming single searches into more comprehensive and cohesive threads of discovery, building upon your initial findings. When you need to cite a paper, the Citation Generator offers a convenient solution. With a single click, you can generate citations for papers of interest in your preferred reference style. For a high-level overview of key findings, the Pro Analysis feature provides summaries from the most relevant papers, offering a concise synthesis with accompanying citations. This helps you quickly grasp the main points without reading every paper in detail.