I tried every single ChatGPT plugin and found the 17 best ChatGPT plugins for research.
Some of these plugins do similar things, but because each receives varying degrees of support and updates from the developers, I want to include multiple options for each major use case.
To quickly find the right plugin for your needs, use this table of contents to jump to a section:
- Best ChatGPT Plugins for Academic Research
- Best ChatGPT Plugins for Web Research
- Best ChatGPT Plugins for Video Research
- Best ChatGPT Plugins for Legal Research
- Best ChatGPT Plugins for Data Analysis
- Best ChatGPT Plugins for Document and Content Analysis
Best ChatGPT Plugins for Academic Research
There are quite a few plugins that help you find relevant academic papers.
I’m including all of them, and I recommend you use multiple when trying to find papers, as each uses different databases and you may get different results. These can be particularly helpful if you want to write a thesis with ChatGPT.
ScholarAI
ScholarAI searches through a database of over 40 million peer-reviewed papers from the Springer-Nature database to find the most relevant matches for your query.
Suggested Prompts
- “Find me the most recent research papers on the impact of ________ on ________.”
- “Can you provide me with the abstracts of the latest studies about the effects of ________ on ________?”
Science
The Science plugin lets you search through OA.mg, an open-access database with over 250 million scientific papers and research articles.
Suggested Prompts
- “Find peer-reviewed papers about _____ from the year _____.”
- “Find the most-cited papers from author _____.”
LitMaps: Visualize Your Literature Research
LitMaps can help you find peer-reviewed papers and understand the connections and relationships between different papers through a seed map.
This plugin is an extension of the Litmaps service. You don’t need ChatGPT to take advantage of Litmaps’ capabilities, but combining the power of ChatGPT and Litmaps can significantly speed up your research process. Note that you’ll need to create a free Litmaps account if you want to save your seed maps.
You can find peer-reviewed papers with a keyword, author name, DOI, Pubmed ID, or arXiv ID.
Suggested Prompts
- “Find all papers about _____ by author _____.”
- “Create a seed map based on this arXiv ID: _____”
Bibliography Crossref: Your Bibliography Assistant
Like many of the other academic research plugins, Bibliography Crossref will find relevant scientific papers for
What sets it apart is its ability to generate bibliographies suitable for academic papers and projects. It shares the publisher, DOI, article type, creation date, author, and ISSN.
Suggested Prompts
- “Find research papers about the effects of _____ on _____”
- “Generate a bibliography for this DOI: _____”
Best ChatGPT Plugins for Web Research
Most of the plugins that let you search the web are pretty terrible, but there are a few that make research faster and easier.
VoxScript
VoxScript is a versatile tool for researchers who need to gather information from a bunch of different sources, including:
- Website content
- Google search results
- DuckDuckGo search results
- YouTube transcripts
- YouTube search results
- Pastebin content
- Current or historical stock/crypto prices
Suggested Prompts
- Summarize this YouTube video: [URL]
- Search YouTube for _____ and output the transcript of the first result.
- Search Google for ____ and give me the URLs for the top 3 results.
- What is the current price of Ethereum?
BrowserOp
BrowserOp lets you browse multiple webpages in a single query. You can either input URLs for the plugin to examine or submit a query and let it search the internet to find the answer.
Suggested Prompts
- Compare these two webpages and tell me the key differences: [URL 1], [URL 2]
- Search the internet for _____ and summarize the results.
- Use these 3 webpages to write a blog post about _____: [URL 1], [URL 2], [URL 3]
TotalQuery Search
TotalQuery lets you search using the combined strength of over 70 search engines, including Google, Bing, PubMed, and many more.
You can simply tell the plugin what you’re looking for and let it determine the best search engine, or tell it which search engine to use.
Suggested Prompts
- Search the internet for _____ and summarize the results.
- Search Google for _____ and summarize the top result.
Best ChatGPT Plugins for Video and Media Research
Let’s delve right into some of the best ChatGPT plugins you can use for video and media research.
VideoInsights.io
VideoInsights.io lets you interact with videos on multiple platforms.
Right now you can only search through YouTube and Vimeo — with Vimeo search requiring a paid subscription — but support is coming soon for the following platforms:
- DailyMotion
- Zoom
- MS Teams
- Google Drive
- BiliBili
This plugin is an extension of the VideoInsights.io software tool.
Suggested Prompts
- What’s interesting about this YouTube video? [URL]
- Summarize this video on Vimeo: [URL]
Best ChatGPT Plugins for Legal Research
While using ChatGPT without any additions for legal research is a pretty bad idea, it can be less risky with the help of these nifty plugins.
US Federal Law Plugin
The US Federal Law plugin deciphers the complexities of U.S. Federal laws for you. Think of it as a digital law assistant who explains legal jargon in plain English.
To use this plugin, simply ask a question about any federal law.
Suggested Prompts
- What are the main points of _____?
- Explain _____ in layman’s terms.
Midpage Caselaw
Midpage Caselaw lets you access accurate, verbatim quotations and full text from US case law.
You can use the plugin in a few ways:
- You can ask for quotations from a specific case.
- You can state a legal principle, cite a case that you think supports it, and get ChatGPT’s opinion.
- You can search for cases relevant to a specific query.
This plugin is based on the midpage software tool.
Suggested Prompts
- Find a case that deals with _____.
- Help me understand the legal points established in the _____ case.
- I think the case of _____ supports the legal principle of _____. Can you confirm this?
Best ChatGPT Plugins for Data Analysis
Wolfram
The Wolfram plugin lets you leverage the resources from Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram Language, providing access to computation, mathematics, curated knowledge, and real-time data within ChatGPT
Of all the plugins available, I think Wolfram is the most powerful due to its ability to shore up ChatGPT’s most glaring weaknesses in computation, math, and up-to-date information.
This plugin has some of the most numerous use cases of any ChatGPT plugin — far too many for me to cover here.
For a complete overview of what it can do, read this plugin overview from Wolfram.
Suggested Prompts
- Create a graph showing the currency conversion rate between _____ and _____ for the past 5 years.
- What is the current population of _____?
- Solve this quadratic equation for me: _____
- How many days until _____?
CSV Export
The CSV Export plugin lets you create and export custom CSV layouts with a few clicks.
Recommended Prompts
- “Create a CSV file with the name ‘_____’ and this array of data…”
- “Export my data as a CSV file.”
Quiver Quantitative
The Quiver Quantitative plugin provides access to data on U.S. congressional stock trading, lobbying, insider trading, and proposed legislation.
Suggested Prompts
The following prompts can be used to get data using the Quiver Quantitative plugin:
- “Show me recent congressional stock trades.”
- “What are the latest corporate lobbying efforts?”
- “Show me congressional trades for the _____ stock.”
- “What is the latest proposed legislation related to healthcare?”
Definitive Facts
Definitive Facts fetches information from more than 100 relational datasets on topics like sports, finance, and more.
Suggested Prompts
Try the following prompts to utilize the Definitive Facts plugin:
- “Show me the historical performance of _____ stocks.”
- “Who won the Super Bowl in ____?”
- “Give me the financial highlights of _____ for the last quarter.”
- “What were the highest grossing movies in _____?”
Chat With Your Data
The Chat With Your Data plugin can link Google Sheets or Postgres databases directly into your chat, enabling conversational analysis with your databases and spreadsheets.
It even lets you run Python pandas queries on your data for more sophisticated analysis.
Suggested Prompts
- What is the average of column ‘B’ in my Google Sheet?
- Show me the max value in the _____ column in my Postgres database.
- Apply a filter to my _____ Google Sheet to only show items with a quantity greater than 20.
- Can you run a pandas dataframe operation on my dataset?
Best ChatGPT Plugins for Document and Content Analysis
Shownotes
Shownotes transcribes long podcast episodes into digestible summaries, highlights key points, and even suggests new episodes based on your interests.
Simply tell Shownotes the name of the podcast you’re interested in, and it’ll fetch the transcript and allow you to ask questions about it.
Suggested Prompts
- Summarize the latest episode of [podcast name]
- What are the key points in this episode of [podcast name]?
- “Suggest some episodes of [podcast name] related to [topic].
ChatOCR
ChatOCR is a powerful tool that can read text from almost any document, whether it’s a scanned PDF, a photo, or even handwriting.
How to Use ChatOCR
To use ChatOCR, paste the URL of the document or image you want to extract text from into the chat with the plugin. The plugin will then extract the text and present it to you in the chat. Please note that the quality of the extraction can depend on the quality of the original file.
Recommended Prompts
- “Can you read the text from this image for me? [image link]”
- “What does this document say? [document link]”
