Use-case stack · general

Research & sourcing

Survey a topic quickly with citations, then verify the primary sources yourself.

Use citation-forward tools, then open the links. Treat model summaries as maps, not destinations.

Preferred / primary

Web Research

Perplexity

Answer engine oriented around cited web research.

In this stack: Cited web survey to start.

Details Site

Web Research

Elicit

Research assistant oriented around papers and systematic evidence finding.

In this stack: Paper-oriented research tasks.

Details Site

Strong alternatives

Web Research

SciSpace

PDF/paper co-pilot for reading and explaining technical papers.

In this stack: Explain a hard PDF in-line.

Details Site

Web Research

Consensus

Search engine that surfaces scientific consensus-style answers from papers.

In this stack: Science consensus-style answers with links.

Details Site

Supporting tools

Web Research

Semantic Scholar

AI-augmented academic search graph (not a chat toy).

In this stack: Discover papers and citation trails.

Details Site

Web Research

Connected Papers

Visual graphs of related papers from a seed paper.

In this stack: Visual map from a seed paper.

Details Site

Web LLM / chat

Google Gemini

Google’s multimodal chat with strong Google Workspace / Search integration.

In this stack: When you live in Google docs/search.

Details Site

Web Research

NotebookLM

Google’s source-grounded notebook for multi-doc Q&A and study guides.

In this stack: Grounded multi-doc notebooks.

Details Site

Web LLM / chat

Claude

Anthropic models strong at long-context writing, code review, and careful analysis.

In this stack: Synthesize long PDFs you provide.

Details Site

Hybrid Research

AnythingLLM

Desktop/self-host RAG chat over your documents with multiple model backends.

In this stack: Private corpus chat for lab docs.

Details Site

Self-hosted Markets

Local LLM for document QA

Ollama/Open WebUI + your PDFs/10-Ks for private Q&A — research aid, not a broker.

In this stack: Fully private document QA.

Details Site

Stacks are editorial starting points — swap tools when policy, budget, or hardware demands it.