Explainpaper

Explainpaper is an academic research tool. A reading assistant for academic PDFs: upload a paper, highlight confusing text, and get plain-language explanations, a paper-grounded chat and auto-generated outlines.

Explainpaper is a reading companion for academic papers. You upload a PDF and then highlight any sentence or term that is blocking you, and the tool returns a simplified explanation of that passage in place. The site pitches this as reading papers roughly ten times faster, and its user testimonials lean heavily on the idea of having someone knowledgeable sitting beside you while you work through dense material. The product is built around three functions. In-context explanations let you tune how deep an answer goes, from beginner framing to expert detail, and the output can be delivered in more than fifty languages, which matters for researchers reading outside their first language. A chat panel answers questions tied to the paper itself rather than to general knowledge, so answers cite specific sections you can jump back to and support follow-up questions. Auto-generated insights produce an outline of the paper, surface key findings and show how concepts relate, giving you a map before you commit to a full read. Pro users can also generate a summary of the whole paper and keep their highlights stored. It suits graduate students, machine learning practitioners and anyone who reads across disciplines where the vocabulary is unfamiliar. The workflow is simple enough that no setup is involved: upload, read, highlight, ask. It works best as a supplement to careful reading rather than a replacement for it, since the explanations are model-generated and you still need to judge whether they are correct. Compared with general purpose chat assistants that can accept a document, Explainpaper stays narrower and more focused on the reading surface, which is where its value sits. The free tier covers unlimited highlights and follow-up questions on basic models, while the Pro tier at $16 per month adds advanced models, whole-paper summaries and saved highlights. The site reports more than 400,000 researchers using it.