Consensus

By Consensus

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Overview

Consensus connects Claude to peer-reviewed scientific literature. Ask a research question in plain language and Consensus searches more than 400 million academic papers from Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, and PubMed, then returns the most relevant studies so answers can cite the research behind them. Use Consensus to: - Find studies on scientific, medical, health, and social-science questions - Narrow results by publication year, study design (such as randomized controlled trials, meta-analyses, and systematic reviews), human studies, or field of study - Review paper details such as authors, journal, year, citation count, abstract, and DOI when available - Ground summaries, literature reviews, and evidence tables in citable sources, with a link to each paper on consensus.app Consensus is built for students, researchers, clinicians, educators, and anyone who wants answers grounded in published research.

Tools

add_to_thread

ChatGPT

Add a new interaction to an existing research thread. Only for a genuinely new follow-up the user raised after the previous interaction's results were delivered. Never chain this onto your own create_thread call to work through parts of a single request — put the whole request in the create_thread brief instead. Call this only once get_thread reports the thread 'idle' or 'failed'. While an earlier interaction is still running this returns an error: keep polling get_thread until status is no longer 'running', then call add_to_thread again. The new interaction runs asynchronously. After calling, wait at least 30 seconds (use a sleep/timeout) before each get_thread poll. Polling faster returns cached 'running' results and does not speed up the agent.

create_thread

ChatGPT

Create a new research thread and dispatch the Consensus research agent. Runs Consensus's specialized scientific research agent: it plans and runs many searches, reads full text, follows citations forward and backward, analyzes and reflects on the evidence, and returns a cited synthesis. Use it for any research question that needs synthesis or analysis rather than a single lookup: what the evidence says, comparisons, mechanisms, literature reviews, or multi-step research tasks. For a single lookup of papers matching a scientific query, use search. Also use this to list the user's library collections, create or rename one, or save papers into one. This dispatches an autonomous research agent that reasons and executes many steps on its own. Delegate the entire request in a single call: pass a full brief covering every part of what the user asked, including ordered sub-tasks ('identify A, then find B related to A'). Do not decompose the request into successive create_thread/add_to_thread calls, and do not do intermediate research yourself to hand it a narrower question — that yields worse results and costs several minutes per hop. After calling, wait at least 30 seconds (use a sleep/timeout) before each get_thread poll. Pro results typically finish within ~3 minutes; Deep results may take up to ~10 minutes. Polling faster returns cached 'running' results and does not speed up the agent.

fetch

ChatGPT

Required before citing a search result. Retrieves the full paper record for an id returned by search, including abstract, authors, journal metadata, citation count, DOI when available, and the canonical Consensus paper URL.

find_threads

ChatGPT

List the signed-in user's research threads. Requires a signed-in Consensus account. Returns thread metadata including a deep-link URL.

get_thread

ChatGPT

Poll a research thread and return the grounded answer when ready. The returned status is 'running' while the agent works and 'idle' when a final answer is available. Wait at least 30 seconds (use a sleep/timeout) between get_thread calls. Pro results typically finish within ~3 minutes; Deep results may take up to ~10 minutes. Calling more frequently than every 30 seconds returns cached 'running' results and does not speed up the agent. When status is 'idle', write the interaction's document field to a file or the client's artifact/canvas/side-panel surface — do not paste it inline in chat and do not paraphrase it. Every inline citation marker, [N.M] (quote M of paper N) or a bare [N], must be preserved exactly; they are already hyperlinked to the cited papers.

search

ChatGPT

Keyword search over 200 million peer-reviewed academic papers. Returns JSON results with id, title, text, and url. You MUST call fetch(id) on any result before citing it. To request filters, include tokens in the query text: year:2020-2026, study:rct, study:meta-analysis, study:systematic-review, human:true.