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What is Papero

Papero is an AI writing workspace for students and researchers. It helps you outline, draft and rewrite your paper, finds real papers to cite as you write, and formats the references for you. The argument stays yours.

You write in the app at app.papero.ai. Your account, plan and billing live on papero.ai.

What you can do in Papero

Section titled “What you can do in Papero”
  • Plan: describe your paper in a sentence or two and Papero turns it into an outline you can edit. You choose the structure: headings that fit your topic, standard sections (introduction, methods, results, discussion) or no headings at all. Each section gets its own prompt, so you can say what it should cover.
  • Write with help: when you pause, Papero suggests how the sentence could go on. Select text to paraphrase, simplify, shorten, expand or make it more academic. Ask for a draft of a section from its prompt, and read it before you add it.
  • Cite as you write: search scholarly papers from where you are writing, or paste a DOI, PMID, arXiv ID or ISBN. The citation goes in at your cursor and the reference list at the end of the document follows. Papero has over 10,000 citation styles, including APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver.
  • Keep a library: every source you cite or save lands in your library, with search and collections. Import BibTeX (.bib) or RIS (.ris) files, import from Zotero or Mendeley, and upload the PDFs of your papers.
  • Ask your library: in Chat, ask questions about the PDFs in your library and the document you are writing. Answers cite the passages they used. On Plus, Chat can also search the web and read an image you attach.
  • Check your work: in the Review panel, Review my draft recommends a check for your document. More checks holds them all: Sources, Proofread, Claims, Peer review, Tone of voice and Citation report, which is part of Plus.
  • Export: download a Word file with the layout, title page and contents you need, or a LaTeX project you can open in Overleaf.
  • Run a Workflow: give Papero a topic and it writes a first draft of a literature review or a research gap analysis in the background, with cited papers.

The other sections of these docs cover each part: Writing, Citations, Library and PDFs, Chat and Workflows and Review and export. For screenshots of the main parts, see the features page.

How Papero's AI handles your text

Section titled “How Papero's AI handles your text”

The first time you use an AI feature in a browser, Papero shows a note called How Papero’s AI handles your text. Read it and press Got it to go on. In short:

  • When you use an AI feature (autocomplete, rewrites, outlines, drafts, Chat, Workflows, the Review checks, or Describe for a chart or equation), Papero sends the text it needs to OpenAI.
  • When you upload a PDF, Papero sends its text to OpenAI once, so it can find the passages that match what you write. Passages of an uploaded PDF can also go along with an AI request.
  • OpenAI processes it in the United States, never trains its models on it, and keeps it for at most 30 days to check for abuse. Papero does not train AI on your documents either.
  • Paper searches send only your search words, or the sentence you are writing, to OpenAlex. Your documents stay stored with Papero.

The Privacy Policy has the full details.

Where Papero works

Section titled “Where Papero works”

Papero runs in your web browser, and there is nothing to install. It is built for a laptop or desktop screen. On a phone or small tablet you can read your documents and make small edits.

In a browser that offers it (Chrome and other Chromium browsers), the account menu has an Install app item. It opens Papero in a window of its own, like a desktop app.

The interface comes in six languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese. See Interface language.

Free and Plus

Section titled “Free and Plus”

Papero has two plans, Free and Plus, and you can start on Free. Free includes your library, every citation style and a reference list you can read and copy. Some features are part of Plus, such as the reference list in Word and LaTeX exports, exporting your sources, the Citation report, and web search and images in Chat. For what each plan includes, see pricing.

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”
  1. Create your account.
  2. Write your first document.
  3. Get to know the editor and its keyboard shortcuts.

To see what Papero looks like for a particular job, such as a literature review or a thesis, see use cases.