SciSpace

SciSpace, founded in Bangalore in 2016 and formerly known as Typeset, is a reading assistant for academic papers. Its central feature is Copilot: highlight any passage, equation, table or figure in a PDF and get it explained in plain language, with follow-up questions answered against the same document. It sits at the point after a paper has been found, when the problem is comprehension rather than discovery.
Why it matters
Reading outside your own subfield is slow for reasons that have nothing to do with the science, unfamiliar notation, undefined acronyms and methods sections written for specialists.
Explaining a passage in place, with the original still on screen, keeps the reader anchored to the source instead of substituting a summary for it.
It lowers the cost of interdisciplinary reading, which is where most useful cross-pollination stalls.
For students and non-native English speakers it removes a barrier that is linguistic rather than conceptual.
Key features & advantages
Copilot: passage-level explanations of text, maths, tables and figures inside the PDF viewer.
Literature review: search across a large paper index and pull results into a comparison table of methods, results and limitations.
Extraction tables: structured side-by-side comparison of a set of papers on columns you define.
Paraphrasing, citation generation and format conversion, inherited from the tool’s Typeset origins as a manuscript formatting service.
Limitations & things to watch
Simplification is the product, and simplification drops caveats, the explanation is a reading aid and not a substitute for the methods section.
Explanations are generated from the document but can still misread a figure or an equation, particularly in dense statistical work.
Extraction tables are only as good as the parse, values pulled from complex tables need spot-checking before they go into a review.
Its search index is smaller and less curated than the dedicated discovery tools, use it for reading rather than for coverage.