ChatGPT plugins for Research
233 plugins, apps and MCP servers in Research, ranked by official status, traction and completeness. Page 1 of 4.
Research plugins connect ChatGPT to dedicated sources and tools: databases of peer-reviewed papers, specialist scientific databases, search APIs built for agents, and exact computation. People use them for literature reviews, evidence summaries on a clinical or policy question, market and company research, and calculations they need to trust.
Paper search usually comes as apps (Consensus, Elicit, SciSpace) that you install from the Plugin Directory and use in a normal chat. OpenAI publishes plugins for specialist fields, such as Life Science Research and Public Equity Investing, that are mostly skills: instructions for querying databases and structuring the output. MCP servers from Exa, Perplexity, Tavily, Brave and others give Codex and other agents web search and page fetching, and you add them yourself.
Before relying on results:
- Check every citation. Open the paper, confirm it exists and says what the summary claims.
- Know the coverage. Consensus searches more than 220 million peer-reviewed papers and Elicit more than 125 million. Neither covers everything, so a missing result is not evidence of absence.
- Check access requirements. PitchBook and Morningstar are for existing clients, Wolfram's MCP service uses a subscription API key, and Exa works without a key only at rate-limited levels. Adding an MCP server to ChatGPT needs developer mode on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise or Education.
- Watch what you share. Unpublished data, patient information and confidential documents go to the connected service, whose own terms apply.
Top picks for Research
Consensus searches more than 220 million peer-reviewed papers and turns the results into structured outputs such as literature reviews, comparison tables and bibliographies. Ask a research question and it summarizes what the studies say. It suits students, writers and practitioners who need sourced answers.
Elicit searches more than 125 million academic papers and builds structured reports that extract and compare data across studies, such as effect sizes from a set of trials. It is built with life sciences R&D in mind. It suits reviews where you need the same data points pulled from many papers.
Exa's hosted server gives agents web search, page fetching, filtered search and a multi-step research agent. It works without a key at rate-limited levels, and with OAuth or an API key for higher limits and the agent features. It suits people building research workflows in Codex; see our Exa setup guide.
The Wolfram app converts questions into Wolfram Language and evaluates them with Wolfram|Alpha, so equations, unit conversions, statistics and plots come back as computed results. It suits students, engineers and analysts who need exact answers. For Codex and other agents, Wolfram also runs an MCP service that uses a subscription API key.
OpenAI's Life Science Research plugin routes questions across about 50 database skills, including UniProt, AlphaFold, ChEMBL, PubChem, ClinicalTrials.gov, ClinVar, gnomAD and Open Targets, and synthesizes the evidence. Use it to summarize clinical trials for a target or find known pathogenic variants in a gene. It is a research aid for scientists, not a source of medical advice.
All 233 in Research
AWS KnowledgeSearch current AWS docs, API references and regional availabilityMCP server · by Amazon Web Services · 9.7k stars · Remote
arXivSearch, download and read arXiv papers locallyMCP server · by Joe Blazick · 3.2k stars
YouTube TranscriptFetch YouTube video transcripts for summarization and Q&AMCP server · by kimtaeyoon83 · 598 starsResearch plugins: common questions
- Which ChatGPT plugins search academic papers?
Consensus and Elicit search well over 100 million papers each, and SciSpace organizes search results into a table with abstracts, methods and conclusions. OpenAI's Life Sciences Literature plugin covers PubMed, PMC and bioRxiv/medRxiv. In Codex, the community arXiv server downloads and reads arXiv papers locally. To manage citations while you write, see the Zotero plugin.
- Can ChatGPT do web research with MCP servers?
Yes. Search servers such as Exa, Perplexity, Tavily and Brave Search give an agent search and page-fetching tools, and Firecrawl scrapes, maps and crawls sites. You add them to Codex, or to ChatGPT through developer mode on an eligible paid plan. Several need an API key from the provider. Setup steps: Add an MCP server to ChatGPT.
- Are AI research plugins reliable?
They help because results link back to papers, databases or pages you can check, but a summary can still miss nuance or overstate a finding. Open the sources behind any claim you plan to use, note which database was searched, and treat a lack of results as a gap in coverage, not proof. For maths and data, Wolfram returns computed results rather than estimates.
- Which plugins help with financial and market research?
OpenAI's Public Equity Investing plugin structures earnings previews, valuation models and memos, and OpenAI labels it research tooling, not investment advice. PitchBook and Morningstar bring their data and research to existing clients. For a general method, the Research Methodology plugin adds source checks and evidence review. See also the Finance category.
Guide updated Oct 24, 2026.