Connected PapersAI Research
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Visual academic paper discovery tool that generates a similarity graph of related research from a single seed paper.
Visit Website →Lateral
FreemiumAI research workspace for literature reviews that organized PDFs, auto-generated findings tables, and ran semantic search across documents. Sunset June 2025.
What is Lateral?
Lateral was an AI research workspace built in Berlin that unified PDF storage, semantic search and literature review into one tool. Its Super Search indexed your documents so you could find passages by concept rather than exact keyword, and auto-generated findings tables collected highlights across papers, which made it genuinely faster than manual review for anyone working through a large corpus. It is no longer available. The team sunset Lateral on 26 June 2025 to focus on a new direction, closing new signups and publishing instructions for exporting libraries, highlights and citations; the successor project is an open-source platform aimed at decentralised science. Lateral's approach influenced how current tools combine semantic search with citation management, and researchers who used it have generally moved to Elicit, Scispace or reference managers with semantic search built in.
Key Features
Super Search Across All DocumentsAI-Powered Concept RecommendationsAuto-Generated Findings TableSmart PDF Reader30M+ Open Access Paper DatabaseOCR for Scanned DocumentsHighlight and Annotation ToolsCross-Document Note CaptureFlag and Categorize FindingsExport to Word and ExcelCollaborate and Share WorkspacesPublic Project SharingLiterature Review WorkflowKeyword and Semantic SearchMulti-Tab Document SwitchingSingle Unified WorkflowBrowser-Based No Install
How to Use Lateral
1Upload research PDFs or search the open access database
2Use Super Search to find relevant passages across all documents at once
3Highlight key findings and let the AI populate your findings table automatically
4Add notes and flags to organize your literature review
5Export findings and references to Word or Excel for your report
✅ Best For
- Academic researchers and PhD students who needed a fast, visual way to organize and cross-reference large collections of PDFs for systematic literature reviews without switching between multiple tools.
- Market research analysts and consultants who worked through large document sets and needed semantic search and auto-organized findings tables to synthesize evidence quickly for client reports.
❌ Not For
- New users looking for an active, supported tool, since Lateral was sunset in June 2025 and is no longer available for new sign-ups or existing access.
- Researchers requiring PRISMA-compliant systematic review workflows, citation manager integration, or AI-generated writing assistance beyond document organization.
Reviews
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Pricing
Free$0
- ✓Basic access
- ✓limited documents
ProCustom
- ✓Unlimited documents
- ✓collaboration
- ✓advanced features (no longer available - product sunset June 2025)
Prompts to Try
Search all my papers for mentions of gut microbiome and mental health
What methodology types appear most frequently across my literature review documents?
Show me all highlights I tagged as key findings across my paper collection
Use Cases
A public health researcher uploaded 60 papers on vaccine hesitancy to Lateral and used Super Search to find every instance of the phrase social trust across all documents in seconds, building a thematic analysis table in one afternoon that would have taken a week manually.
A market research consultant used Lateral's auto-generated findings table to organize 25 industry reports for a client presentation, keeping all key statistics attributed to their source papers without manually copying and pasting each one.
A master's student used Lateral's Smart PDF Reader to spot connections between papers she was reading, discovering that two papers shared a common methodological limitation that became a key argument in her dissertation literature review critique.
An environmental NGO analyst uploaded 40 policy documents and used Lateral's concept feature to surface all passages mentioning carbon pricing, exporting the findings table to Excel as a policy brief attachment for a government meeting.
A science journalist used Lateral to organize three weeks of research PDFs on AI regulation, searching across all documents for quotes about liability before writing a long-form investigative piece on the topic.
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