Paperpal

What do you like best about the product?

I appreciate that Paperpal is particularly focused on academic and scholarly writing, providing features such as grammar and style checks, clarity suggestions, and technical term validation.

There are 5 tools in particular that I have found really valuable for academic writing support as someone who frequently uses Paperpal:

1. Grammar and spelling checks - Paperpal thoroughly checks the document for grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, ensuring that the writing is error-free and professional. It's very easy to use and simple to integrate it into MS Word (which is how I use it - really easy to implement).

2. Technical term validation - Paperpal helps in validating technical terms and jargon specific to various academic fields. So, if you want to make sure that a word you're using is academically sound for your subject, this is a great tool to use.

3. Consistency checks - Paperpal checks for consistency in the use of terminology, abbreviations, and formatting, which I found particularly helpful for long manuscripts where maintaining consistency can be challenging.

4. Journal-specific formatting - Paperpal is one of the few AI platforms that offer guidance on formatting documents according to the specific requirements of various academic journals. For example, Paperpal adjusts citation styles, reference formats and other journal-specific guidelines to increase the chances of acceptance.

5. Plagiarism check - this is one of the most useful features - you can submit the document you've written to the plagiarism checker which scans your work through a database of billions of literature/papers/online sources to check for accidental plagiarism.

Overall, the academic AI tool that I recommend to beginners, students and even seasoned professors if you're looking to add ease into your writing process.

What do you dislike about the product?

I am a user of the other tools in Paperpal's family, like R Discovery. When I read research papers in R Discovery, it would be nice to then be able to access them through Paperpal and add them into my reading list from where I can reference / add citations.

I understand this is probably on it's way and something that will come with time.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Paperpal is helping me write, feeling like I'm guided by an assistant. Before such AI tool, I'd have to email my supervisor or a professor who could look over and make sure that my work was academically sound. Now, I can simply get the final check through and perfect my academic writing before submitting the final version for review. It has acted like my second eyes and I truly appreciate that it has given me the independence to write and edit, without needing to go for support.

I also was struggling with finding the right words to meet academic requirements. Using Paperpal, I have been able to make my work sound more academic, choose the right synonyms and produce academic writing that sounds professional. It doesn't change the meaning of my work, Paperpal simply enhances and corrects the writing that I have presented.

What do you like best about the product?

As a PhD student, I really like how Paperpal understands academic writing. It's great for fixing grammar and gives suggestions that really fit with scientific language. It works well with Microsoft Word and can translate tricky academic terms.
Quite often the results did surprise me as they used jargon that I wasn't aware of.

The last version I tested introduced some new features: Like the CoPilot that served as a conversaitonal AI integration in word and would answer general questions on writing academic text.

What do you dislike about the product?

Paperpal focuses a lot on academic writing. This is good for formal papers but might not work for more creative writing. Sometimes, the AI doesn't fully get complex ideas, so you need to double-check its suggestions to make sure they fit your meaning. Lastly the inital loading of the suggestions can take some time, as paperpal scans the entire paper rather than go paragraph by paragraph (This might be a good thing however!)

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Paperpal is super helpful for fixing common writing problems. Since english isn't my first langauge I ended up using it frequently and incorporating a lot of corrections.

The "Rewrite" and "Trim" features helped making my writing clearer and more concise. It saved me a lot of time and guesswork.

For me, as a scientist, Paperpal ended up being a big help and a tool that I keep relying on.