Models
A mixture of models, cross-checked.
Every frontier model (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Mistral, Grok) alongside our own, routed per sub-task and made to check each other. No single-model bias.
Explore Science vs PaperReview.ai
PaperReview.ai is a free Stanford tool that emails an AI review of a draft's first 15 pages. Explore Science reads the whole manuscript across several frontier models, scores it, verifies its references, and keeps every revision in one place.
The short answer
Choose Explore Science when the paper is one you will actually revise: the full manuscript read in any field, a Calibre score across eight categories, every reference checked against live databases, and per-dimension movement tracked from draft to draft. Choose PaperReview.ai when you want a free, fast structural read on a machine-learning draft, where its arXiv retrieval and Stanford benchmarking are real strengths. It is the free first pass; we are the system of record.
Compared July 2026 · from PaperReview.ai's own published materials
Choose Explore Science when
- Reads the entire manuscript, so methods, results, and the reference list later in the paper are assessed rather than skipped.
- Verifies every reference against live scholarly databases, which turns citation checking into a check on whether claims are supported by real, correctly attributed work.
- Cross-checks each review across Claude, GPT, Gemini, Mistral, and Grok plus our in-house Explorer One, against a pipeline that names no base model.
- Scores every revision and shows which dimensions moved between drafts, in a workspace co-authors can join.
- Applies one eight-category rubric in any field, with Rosa on hand to answer questions about the paper, its review, and your earlier work.
Choose PaperReview.ai when
- Free, with no sign-up and no paid tier; Explore Science is free to start, then paid.
- Searches arXiv per submission and folds the retrieved prior work into the review, which situates a contribution against current work in the field.
- Its scores track ICLR 2025 reviewer scores about as closely as two human reviewers track each other: Spearman 0.42 against 0.41, with an acceptance-prediction AUC of 0.75 on 147 submissions.
- Reviews come back fast; first-hand accounts report minutes.
- Publishes an open technical overview of its pipeline, which is unusually transparent for a review tool.
Side by side
| Capability |  | PaperReview.ai |
|---|---|---|
| What it reviews | Full manuscript, any field | First 15 pages, English only, tuned to AI and machine-learning research |
| TurnaroundTime to a result | Up to 2 hours for a full-depth pass, emailed when it lands | No figure published; first-hand accounts report minutes |
| Related workSituating the paper in the literature | Novelty and integrity checks against the literature | Searches arXiv per submission and cites the retrieved work back to you |
| Review engine | Claude, GPT, Gemini, Mistral, and Grok plus our in-house Explorer One, cross-checking each other | One openly documented agentic pipeline; base model not named |
| Quality score | Calibre: a score out of 100 across eight categories, any field | 1 to 10 across seven dimensions, displayed only when the target venue is ICLR |
| Reference and claim support | Every reference verified against live databases | Published pipeline contains no citation or DOI check |
| Revisions | Each version scored; per-dimension movement shown draft to draft | Published pipeline contains no version-to-version comparison |
| Follow-up questions | Rosa answers questions about this paper, its review, and your earlier work | One emailed report, retrieved by access token; no follow-up channel |
| PricingCost of one review | $49 for one full-depth review with no subscription, or monthly plans from $99 | Free, no sign-up, no paid tier |
| Data policy | Does not train on your manuscript; you can delete it | No privacy or retention policy published (checked July 2026) |
90% rate a review on par with or better than the human peer review they have had.
Two in three rate it better. From 304 head-to-head ratings by researchers who had received peer review on the same paper. These are our own users, self-reported, which is worth knowing when you weigh them.
Depth
Why a thorough review takes the time it takes.
Most tools optimize for speed. Explore Science runs the engine we built to conduct original research autonomously, and points it at your manuscript: it reads recent literature in your field, checks every reference, and works through the paper the way a careful reviewer does.
The time is the method, not an overhead on it.
How a paper is scoredTime spent thinking about your paper
How long a review actually takes
Single-pass LLM
~2 min
Other AI reviewers
5 to 20 min
Human peer review
(active reading time)
~30 min
Explore Science
up to 2 hrs
Industry observation; self-reported vendor figures; Publons peer-review time survey, 2018.
The engine
What actually reads your paper.
Three pieces of the architecture do the work behind every review.
Agents
Scientific agents that reason like the field.
Dozens of specialised agents work each review in parallel, each tuned to one dimension of analysis, spawning more when a section needs them.
Infrastructure
An in-house science stack.
Memory that holds your paper in context for the whole review, live verification of every citation, and novelty assessment. Built over years of autonomous science.
The ceiling is fifteen pages
PaperReview.ai, the Stanford Agentic Reviewer, takes a PDF of up to 10MB and an email address, pulls related prior work from arXiv, and emails back a written review you retrieve with an access token. It reads the first 15 pages, handles English papers, and is tuned to AI research; its own technical overview says it is less accurate for other disciplines, and the 1 to 10 score appears only when the target venue is ICLR. For a machine-learning draft you want triaged today, that is a good deal at zero cost.
Fifteen pages is where most manuscripts are still setting up. Methods detail, results tables, limitations, and the reference list all sit past it. Explore Science reads to the end, in any field, and keeps each paper in a workspace where revisions stack and are scored against each other.
arXiv retrieval is not citation checking
Their grounding runs outward: the agent generates search queries, retrieves arXiv papers through Tavily, filters them for relevance, and writes the review against what it found. That is a real strength for situating an ML contribution against the preprints around it. Our Novelty Check searches the live literature too, through Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex rather than arXiv, and answers a narrower question: whether the contribution has already been made.
Ours runs inward. Explore Science checks every reference in your list against live scholarly databases and flags any that do not resolve to real, correctly attributed work, which is how a claim gets tested against the source it rests on. Their published pipeline contains no step that does this.
Common questions
What does PaperReview.ai cost?
Nothing. There is no paid tier and no sign-up: you upload a PDF and an email address, and retrieve the review with an emailed access token. Explore Science is free to start; a single full-depth review is $49 with no subscription, and monthly plans start at $99 with an allowance for reviews and chat.
What happens to my manuscript after I upload it?
PaperReview.ai publishes no privacy policy, retention window, or security certification, so the fate of an unpublished draft after upload is undocumented (checked July 2026). Explore Science does not train on your manuscript, and you can delete it.
Is PaperReview.ai good for papers outside computer science?
It is tuned to fields whose recent work sits on arXiv, so it is strongest on AI and machine learning; its own technical overview says it is less accurate for other disciplines, and it handles English papers only. Explore Science applies the same eight-category rubric in any field and reads the whole manuscript, at the cost of a longer wait.
Claims about PaperReview.ai reflect its own published materials; everything about Explore Science reflects what the platform does today. Sources: PaperReview.ai, PaperReview.ai technical overview. Something out of date? and we will fix it.
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