Report

Should I Use Connected Papers?

connectedpapers.com·Analyzed 2 hours ago·9/19/2026·Based on 12 sources

Connected Papers is a visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find academic papers relevant to their field of work.

Worth it

Buy if you're a researcher, PhD student, or applied scientist mapping related work around a paper you already have.

Cheap, visual literature scout: paste a seed paper, get ~50 related works. Weak for systematic reviews and newest papers.

Confidence: High

9.41/10

G2 rating

309+ reviews per Tooliverse consensus

$6/mo

Starting price

Academic plan, billed $72 annually

5 graphs/mo

Free tier

All features included, no account required

~50 papers

Graph size

Per graph, arranged by similarity

Value for money

Generous free tier; $6/mo academic is cheap

Ease of use

Paste a paper, get an instant graph

Feature depth

Similarity graphs only; thin for systematic work

Pros

Free tier includes every feature; no account needed to start^⁶
One seed paper yields an interactive graph of ~50 related works^⁴
Strong reviews: 9.4/10 consensus across 309+ users^⁴
Users report finding papers standard searches missed^⁸
arXiv partnership strengthens math, physics, and ML coverage^⁸

Cons

Weak coverage of the very latest publications^⁵
Maps similarity, not citation chains^⁴
Not sufficient alone for systematic reviews^⁶
Each graph covers only ~50 papers^⁴

Gotchas

mediumFree plan hard-caps at 5 graphs/month; heavy literature passes force the upgrade^⁷
mediumAcademic plan is $72 billed annually, not a true month-to-month $6^⁷
mediumOne-shot ~50-paper graphs; systematic-review-scale work needs other or paid tooling^⁶

Best for

PhD students and academics
Applied scientists entering a new field
Quick literature scans around a seed paper
arXiv-heavy fields: ML, physics, math

Not for

Systematic review teams needing exhaustive, reproducible coverage
Anyone chasing the newest publications — lag noted in reviews
Researchers needing citation-chain tracing; it maps similarity, not citations
Non-academic teams — this is strictly scholarly literature discovery

Companies that use it

ETH Zurich (library guide)
The University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong Metropolitan University
EdTech Hub

Pricing

Free

5 graphs per month
All features included
No account required

Academic

$6/mo (billed $72 annually)

Unlimited graphs

Business

Not published in reviewed sources

Unlimited graphs
Commercial-use licensing

Security

No known public vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed.

What users say

Users love it for surfacing papers they'd otherwise miss; the recurring complaint is coverage of the newest publications.

“I was able to find links to a paper I hadn’t been able to find and discovered relevant papers I hadn’t seen before. Definitely recommend!”

— Reddit, r/math

“While the tool is excellent for finding related papers in your field, it might have some limitations when it comes to searching for the very latest publications”

— G2 review

“When researching a paper I always try to find papers that cited or were cited by instead so this will be a real short-cut! It's like the research version of ancestry.com.”

— Reddit, r/InternetIsBeautiful