I'm drowning in research papers for my masters thesis and honestly I'm getting so behind. I have like fifteen 100-page PDFs on urban planning that I need to get through by next Friday and my brain is just fried. I've been looking at a few different ways to handle this because copy-pasting into the regular free chatgpt is just a nightmare with the character limits and it keeps cutting off.

I am basically torn between just biting the bullet and paying for ChatGPT Plus to use the native file upload or going with something more specialized like ChatPDF or maybe the AI PDF plugin. ChatPDF looks simple but I've heard it can hallucinate a lot with really long technical docs which scares me. On the other hand, $20 a month for GPT Plus is kinda steep for a student budget but if it actually reads the whole thing without skipping sections then maybe it is worth it?

I've also seen people mention Claude but I really want to stick with something that integrates well with my current workflow. Does anyone have experience with which one actually gives the most accurate summaries for long-form stuff? I dont want it to just give me a generic blurb, I need it to actually catch the specific data points in the middle of the document. Is the specialized tool better than the general GPT-4o model for this kind of thing or am I overthinking it?