Tool Review: Consensus 2026 for Lit Reviews & Writing Phase

Dear Reader,

I am wrapping up writing my PhD thesis and am currently 3 months ahead of schedule, with two papers accepted and two more in review. This feels good, especially as I will be able to dedicate much more time to the EffortlessAcademic.

I think most students could do this if they master what almost nobody does: The combination of digital notes + AI. Here is why:

1. A digital note-taking system, helps learning and remembering information, so you don't need to re-read papers. Your notes are also excellent raw material for AI writing.
2. The growing capabilities of AI for academic writing, along with your experience using it, can make you twice as fast. During the PhD thesis, I was writing ~700-1000 words per day. With a paper two years ago, I barely made it to 350 words.
3. ​Consensus's semantic search, to back up and double-check your ideas and claims during writing. Using Consensus, this takes 1-2 minutes; reading it up in your Zotero Library can easily take an hour.

This week, we reviewed the newest features Consensus has and how to leverage them for your literature review and writing phase. There are a few exciting developments, like the citation graph (which you might know from Litmaps) and the Zotero integration. A tool you shouldn't miss, even if you won't pay for it.

Summary: Consensus is a search-and-synthesis engine for academic papers. Given a query, it can find relevant papers and synthesise what they collectively say about a topic. This article dives into three use cases: General literature search, analysing your own Zotero library, and discovering related papers by exploring their references (rather than semantic similarity). Analogy: Libraries allowed us to find books easily; Google search allowed us to find individual papers easily; and Consensus finds evidence within these papers, thus making smaller and smaller details efficiently findable.

Webinar: Writing With AI 2026 • Apr 11th

As mentioned above, using AI + digital notes for writing made me 2-3x more productive. In this webinar, I share with you 3+ years of experience on how to use AI to write academic work.

Right now, companies are building increasingly better AI tools for writing. I think of them as faster and bigger "cars".

But if these cars don't have a "road" to drive on, they get stuck in the mud and won't drive at all! (This is the moment when you realise you can't just get ChatGPT to write your paper for you.)

Digital notes are the "road" an AI tool needs to work well.

The prompts and guidelines are the "traffic rules" necessary for traffic to run smoothly and safely.

Without roads and traffic rules, the best car will be useless.

In this webinar, I am going to show you how to build the foundation for using AI in academic writing, rather than pitch you new and shiny tools.

Here is what we'll cover:

• The "Atomic Statement Method" to control what AI writes
• Building AI assistants specifically for academic writing
• Teaching an AI to write in your voice instead of a generic tone
• Fact-checking your writing with AI
• Skim papers with AI to deepen specific arguments
• Improve clarity and flow of manuscript drafts
• Understand which parts of the paper are suitable for AI writing
• An iterative writing improvement workflow which avoids plagiarism
• Understand when not to use AI for writing
• Ethical considerations of AI writing (journals and universities)

Check the link below for more information & the date of the Webinar:

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

​
Ilya Shabanov
The Effortless Academic​

This is the weekly Effortless Academic Newsletter. It consists of an in-depth tutorial and additional events, promotions, or relevant information for the AI-curious modern academic. I strive to consistently provide value with every email. If this is not relevant to you, you can always unsubscribe from everything and will never hear from me again. If you find the email somehow inappropriate, please reply to me and let me know what you didn't like.