Paperpal

Paperpal is an AI writing assistant for academic research from Cactus Communications, with grammar, plagiarism and citation checks for papers and theses.

Paperpal helps researchers and students take a rough draft to a manuscript ready for a journal or a supervisor. It concentrates on the conventions of scholarly prose, and its paraphrasing draws on a large body of published research. Cactus Communications, the group behind Editage and R Discovery, builds and runs it. The product has its own web editor at paperpal.com and is sold there directly. The Checks panel runs grammar and consistency suggestions, Plagiarism Check, AI Detection, Journal Fit and Reference Check over an uploaded document in one click. Write predicts the next sentence and offers Keep Writing, Expand On, Counterargument, Analogy and Example prompts. Rewrite paraphrases a selection, improves its fluency, makes it more academic or simplifies it, and can also shift tone, trim length or translate. Chat PDF answers questions about uploaded papers and cites the passages it drew on. Research Q&A and citation lookup sit beside a citation generator that formats references in APA, MLA and thousands of other styles. The audience is anyone whose writing is judged by editors and examiners: researchers preparing journal submissions, graduate students writing theses, and faculty. Students with coursework due all year suit the middle tier, while the top tier is pitched at papers, theses and clinical documents. A free plan lets a new user try every tool within usage caps. Paid access is sold per user on annual billing, and the middle tier can also be prepaid for two or three years. Universities and other institutions arrange institution-wide access with the sales team. Paperpal also works inside the editors where academic drafts are written. A researcher polishing a manuscript in Microsoft Word works through the add-in, and a co-author in Google Docs uses the add-on. Authors writing LaTeX in Overleaf, or publishing in Notion, Medium or Substack, reach it through the Chrome or Edge extension. In the last days before submission, one account checks the final file for overlap with published work and for AI-generated passages, then formats its reference list in the journal's citation style.