I've been using a few of these for my masters and honestly, I'm pretty satisfied with how things are going lately. You really gotta stop using standard GPT for refs because it's just gonna lie to you.

• Perplexity AI Pro Search is what I use daily. It actually links to real sources it finds online so you can verify them immediately. No fake stuff there.
• SciSpace Literature Review Tool is my top choice for the actual drafting phase. It has a Copilot that extracts data directly from actual PDFs and helps you synthesize your findings.
• Consensus Research Search Engine is good if you just need a quick yes or no answer based on actual peer-reviewed papers. Pricing for SciSpace is actually decent if you do the annual plan. No complaints here, it’s saved me dozens of hours on my lit review. Just make sure you double-check the context because it can miss some nuances in the study results sometimes.

ugh the fake citation thing is honestly such a mess. i tried a few of those academic ones last semester and they were way more expensive than they should be, and frankly not as helpful as i hoped. i think i heard that most of them just pull from the same databases anyway? not 100% sure if they actually help the writing flow much tho. kinda disappointing tbh.