Find the right journal — and the work you should be citing.
Research Assistant matches your manuscript draft to relevant journals and surfaces prior work to cite from PubMed, OpenAlex and Crossref — all inside a Chrome side panel.
Your draft is processed entirely in your browser. It is never uploaded to any server.
Two questions every author agonises over
You've finished a draft. Now: where do I submit it? — and have I missed prior work I should be citing? The usual answers are a supervisor who knows two journals, and a literature search you're never quite sure is complete.
- Journal selection is guesswork — publisher "journal finders" are limited and lock you into their ecosystem.
- Literature gaps cause desk rejections — reviewers notice the obvious paper you didn't cite.
- Existing tools want your manuscript on their servers — a real privacy problem for unpublished work.
How it works
Open the side panel
Click the toolbar icon — Research Assistant opens beside whatever you're reading or writing.
Paste your draft
Drop in your abstract, introduction, or a section. Nothing is uploaded — it's processed on your device.
Get results
Ranked journals, prior work to cite (with one-click BibTeX/RIS/CSV), or overlap with your own past drafts.
Three tools in one side panel
Where could I publish this?
An AI sentence-embedding model runs locally and ranks a curated set of journals by topical fit — with similarity scores, open-access status, approximate APCs, and a link to each journal's submission page.
What should I cite?
Samples distinctive phrases from your draft and searches PubMed, OpenAlex and Crossref for prior work that resembles your writing. Filter, sort, and export to BibTeX, RIS or CSV.
My drafts library
Keep a private, on-device library of your own earlier papers and check a new draft for overlap with them — useful for thesis writers reusing conference-paper material. Fully offline.
Privacy & Trust
- Your draft never leaves your machine. There is no backend — the architecture makes collection impossible.
- No account, no tracking, no telemetry. The journal matcher and drafts library make no network calls at all once the model is cached.
- The "What should I cite?" search sends only short, anonymous phrases to the public PubMed, OpenAlex and Crossref APIs — the same kind of text you'd type into a search box.
- A built-in "Verify privacy" panel shows every network request the extension makes, so you can confirm the above yourself.
It is a discovery and self-check assistant — not a plagiarism checker and not an AI-content detector. Read the full privacy policy.
Built by Dr. Rafiq Muhammad, PhD — author of the Mastering Research book series.
Pricing
Every feature, for everyone — no subscription, no tiers, no account.
Built for students and researchers who have no budget and no institutional Turnitin/Scopus access — and who deserve good tools anyway.
Email is entirely optional and opt-in — leave it blank forever, or add it to hear about occasional updates.
Frequently asked questions
Is my manuscript uploaded anywhere?
No. The journal matcher and the drafts library run entirely in your browser and make no network calls once the model is cached. The "What should I cite?" feature sends only short, anonymous phrases (not your full draft) to the public PubMed, OpenAlex and Crossref APIs — exactly like typing a query into PubMed. There is no GradSummit server that ever sees your draft. See the full privacy policy.
Is this a plagiarism checker?
No — and deliberately so. Research Assistant is a discovery and self-check assistant. It surfaces similar prior work so you can cite it, and flags overlap with your own earlier drafts so you can disclose reuse. It never accuses your writing of plagiarism, and it contains no AI-content "detector" (those have high false-positive rates against non-native English writers).
How much does it cost?
It's free, with no subscription and no paid tiers. Every feature is available to everyone. There's nothing to buy and no account to create.
What data do you collect?
None by default. The only thing the extension can send to GradSummit is your email address — and only if you explicitly opt in to product updates and click Subscribe. No manuscript content is ever transmitted to us. Full details here.
Does it work offline?
The journal matcher works offline after a one-time model download (~30 MB from Hugging Face, then cached). The drafts-library overlap check is fully offline. The "What should I cite?" search needs internet, since it queries the public bibliographic APIs.
Which fields does it cover?
The first journal index is biomedical-leaning (medicine, public health, life sciences), and the citation search works across any field indexed by PubMed, OpenAlex and Crossref. Broader discipline coverage is on the roadmap.
What if I find a bug?
Email support@gradsummit.com — replies go to a real human (the developer).