Introduction
Alfred Scholar is an AI-powered academic research platform designed to help researchers, students, and academics manage every stage of their research workflow - from discovering and reading papers to writing manuscripts and submitting for peer review.
What is Alfred Scholar?
Alfred Scholar brings together the tools researchers use every day into a single, unified platform:
- Research Library: Upload, organize, and annotate your PDF research papers.
- Ask Alfred: Ask questions about your documents and receive instant answers with exact citations.
- Telescope: Compare a stack of papers in one page-cited matrix with a synthesis of the gaps.
- Loops: A weekly research digest for your keywords, emailed with sources and saved as an Insight.
- Second Brain: Alfred turns each conversation into connected notes, filed for you and traceable to their source, so your workspace remembers what you learned.
- Citation Management: Import, organize, and format references in any academic citation style or create your own style.
- Manuscript Editor: Write academic papers with a rich text editor along with tables, images and built-in citation insertion.
- Peer Review: Share manuscripts with reviewers for structured feedback with inline comments and annotations.
- Plagiarism Detection: Check your work for unintentional similarity before submission.
- Team Collaboration: Create workspaces, invite colleagues and reviewers, and work together on shared research.
Who is Alfred Scholar for?
Alfred Scholar is built for anyone involved in academic research:
- Graduate students managing coursework papers, thesis research, and literature reviews.
- Postdoctoral researchers juggling multiple projects and collaborating across labs.
- Professors supervising student work and reviewing manuscripts.
- Research teams that need a shared workspace for papers, citations, and manuscripts.
- Independent researchers who want a streamlined workflow from reading to writing.
How it works
Alfred Scholar follows the natural flow of academic research:
- Gather - Upload your research papers to build a personal library.
- Read & Understand - Use the PDF reader to highlight, annotate, and take notes. Ask Alfred questions about your papers.
- Organize - Sort papers into folders and manage your citations.
- Write - Draft your manuscript in the built-in editor with one-click citation insertion.
- Review - Share your draft with peers for structured feedback, then check for plagiarism.
- Submit - Export your polished manuscript, confident in its originality and quality.
Key concepts
Before diving in, here are a few terms you will see throughout Alfred Scholar:
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Workspace | Your private research environment. All documents, manuscripts, and citations live inside a workspace. You can have multiple workspaces and invite team members to collaborate. |
| Plan | Your workspace starts with a 3-day Pro trial, then runs on Pro or Lab to determine usage limits for documents, AI messages, and plagiarism checks. Usage is shared among all workspace members. See Plans & Billing for details. |
| Document | A PDF research paper uploaded to your library. After upload, Alfred Scholar automatically extracts text, metadata and citations. |
| Manuscript | A document you are writing in Alfred Scholar’s built-in rich text editor. Manuscripts support citations, tables, images and text formatting. |
What you will need
- A modern web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge).
- An email address for account registration.
- PDF files of the research papers you want to work with.
Next steps
Ready to get started? Head to the Getting Started guide to create your account and set up your first workspace.