# Academic Research ChatGPT Plugins

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/academic_research_chatgpt_plugins
> Updated: 2026-06-23
> Categories: AI Tools & Products, ChatGPT
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), a free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Quote with attribution.

Academic research [ChatGPT plugins](/wiki/chatgpt_plugins) were a now-deprecated category of third-party tools that extended [ChatGPT](/wiki/chatgpt) with capabilities aimed at scholars, students, and technical professionals, including literature search, PDF question answering, symbolic computation, and notebook-style data analysis. They are historical: [OpenAI](/wiki/openai) ran plugins as a beta launched on March 23, 2023, disabled new plugin conversations on March 19, 2024, and ended all remaining plugin conversations on April 9, 2024.[1][12] The functionality moved to custom GPTs in the GPT Store and later to native ChatGPT tools, so the plugins described below can no longer be installed or used through the original plugin interface.

This article serves as a historical reference. The plugins listed here are no longer reachable through the original plugin interface; many of their developers later released equivalent functionality as [GPTs](/wiki/gpts) (custom GPTs) in the [GPT Store](/wiki/gpt_store), as standalone web products, or as Model Context Protocol servers. Where ChatGPT once needed a separate research plugin, OpenAI now ships built-in browsing, file uploads, connectors, and [deep research](/wiki/deep_research) instead.

## What were academic research ChatGPT plugins?

The underlying [large language model](/wiki/large_language_model) behind ChatGPT in 2023 (then [GPT-3.5](/wiki/gpt-3.5) and [GPT-4](/wiki/gpt-4)) had two well-known weaknesses for scholarly work: its knowledge cutoff blocked recent papers, and it could fabricate citations that looked plausible but did not exist. Academic research plugins addressed both problems by fetching real data at query time, an early production form of [retrieval augmented generation](/wiki/retrieval_augmented_generation).

Typical use cases included:

* Literature search across peer-reviewed databases, returning real papers with DOIs and abstracts.
* PDF question answering, where a user uploaded or linked a paper and asked the model to summarize, extract methods, or pull figures.
* Symbolic mathematics, exact numerical computation, unit conversion, and curated scientific data lookup.
* Notebook-style data analysis with Python, SQL, and Markdown cells generated from natural-language prompts.
* Web and link reading, used to pull content from preprint servers, university pages, and news coverage of research.
* Diagram generation for explaining concepts, mechanisms, or workflows in a paper.

A single chat session could host up to three plugins at once, which encouraged combinations such as ScholarAI plus AskYourPDF plus Wolfram for an end-to-end "find, read, compute" loop. Across the whole beta, OpenAI's plugin store grew to more than 1,000 plugins before it closed, of which the research and computation tools below were among the most heavily used.[12][21]

## Are ChatGPT plugins still available?

No. ChatGPT plugins are deprecated and were fully retired in 2024. OpenAI disabled the creation of new plugin conversations on March 19, 2024, and ended all existing plugin conversations on April 9, 2024.[12] The plugin store no longer exists, and the OpenAI help center error returned to anyone trying to use one reads that "Plugins are no longer supported."[21] Research workflows that once depended on plugins now run on custom GPTs, on OpenAI's built-in browsing and Advanced Data Analysis tools, or on standalone academic-AI products. The successor framework is described under [GPTs](/wiki/gpts).

## Background and timeline: when did ChatGPT plugins launch and shut down?

OpenAI announced the ChatGPT plugin system on March 23, 2023, alongside twelve initial partners (Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier) plus first-party browsing and code execution plugins.[1][2] Of those twelve, only Wolfram targeted research and computation directly, but the platform was designed to be open: any developer could publish a plugin by exposing an OpenAPI manifest.

Key plugin platform dates relevant to the academic research category:

| Date | Event |
| --- | --- |
| March 23, 2023 | OpenAI announces ChatGPT plugins, Wolfram included among 12 launch partners[1][2] |
| Late April 2023 | Roughly 70 plugins available; alpha access expands beyond the initial waitlist[3] |
| May 11, 2023 | Noteable announces its data-analysis plugin[4] |
| May 12, 2023 | Plugin store opens broadly to ChatGPT Plus users; ScholarAI, AskYourPDF, and ChatWithPDF reach the wider audience around this time[5][6][7] |
| July 6 to July 11, 2023 | OpenAI promotes Code Interpreter from alpha to beta for all Plus users, providing a sandboxed Python environment alongside third-party plugins[8] |
| September 27, 2023 | Consensus releases its ChatGPT plugin connecting to a database of more than 200 million research papers[9] |
| November 6, 2023 | OpenAI DevDay introduces GPTs as a successor framework for plugin-style customization[10] |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens, signalling that plugin migration is well underway[11] |
| March 19, 2024 | New plugin conversations disabled; users can no longer install new plugins or start new conversations using existing plugins[12] |
| April 9, 2024 | All remaining plugin conversations end; the plugin platform fully shuts down[12] |

The academic research category was always informal. OpenAI surfaced plugins by tags and curated lists rather than by formal taxonomy, so the same tool sometimes appeared under "Research," "Education," or "Productivity" depending on the week. For an overview of how plugins were grouped during the live era, see [chatgpt plugin categories](/wiki/chatgpt_plugin_categories).

## What did academic research plugins do?

The table below lists plugins that published verifiable launch information and were widely covered as academic or research tools during the plugin era. Plugins that could not be confirmed through at least two credible sources are omitted.

| Plugin | Function | Developer | Verified period |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Wolfram | Symbolic math, computation, curated scientific data via Wolfram Language and Wolfram\|Alpha | Wolfram Research | March 23, 2023 launch[1][13] |
| ScholarAI | Search of peer-reviewed articles, abstract retrieval, citation handling | ScholarAI team (Mudunuri, Burrow, Holmes, Bakshi) | Available from May 2023[5][14] |
| AskYourPDF | Upload or link a PDF and chat with its contents | AskYourPDF | Active in plugin store from May 2023[6][15] |
| ChatWithPDF | PDF and Google Drive document query via URL | sdan.io | Documented in OpenAI developer community May 2023[7] |
| Noteable | Generate and run Jupyter-style notebooks (Python, SQL, Markdown) from prompts | Noteable | Announced May 11, 2023[4][16] |
| Link Reader | Fetch and parse web pages, PDFs, slides, and documents from a URL | gochitchat.ai | Listed in plugin store from June 20, 2023, later removed[17] |
| Show Me Diagrams | Generate Mermaid, GraphViz, PlantUML, and similar diagrams inline | bra1nDump | Active in plugin store during 2023[18] |
| Consensus | Search 200M+ research papers with cited summaries | Consensus | Plugin launched September 27, 2023[9][19] |

### Wolfram

The Wolfram plugin was the headline academic-leaning launch partner. Stephen Wolfram framed it as giving ChatGPT "computational superpowers," allowing the model to formulate a query, send it to Wolfram\|Alpha or the Wolfram Language kernel, and then describe the result in natural language.[13] For users working on physics, chemistry, statistics, or pure math, Wolfram corrected the well-known weakness of [GPT-4](/wiki/gpt-4) on multi-step arithmetic and provided access to curated datasets covering chemistry, geography, astronomy, and finance.

### ScholarAI

ScholarAI focused on what its team called "hallucination-free" literature retrieval. The plugin connected ChatGPT to open-access Springer Nature journals and other indexed sources, returning real titles, authors, abstracts, and links rather than allowing the model to invent references.[5][14] An August 2023 piece in TechXplore described early use of ScholarAI by cardiothoracic researchers, noting that the plugin reduced the rate of fabricated citations dramatically compared with stock ChatGPT.[20]

### AskYourPDF and ChatWithPDF

Two similar PDF-question-answering plugins reached the store in May 2023. AskYourPDF, developed by an independent team, allowed both URL ingestion and uploads through its web app, then exposed the document for query inside ChatGPT.[6] ChatWithPDF, developed by Surya Dantuluri (sdan.io), accepted a public URL pointing to a hosted PDF and indexed the file for the duration of the conversation.[7] Both became staples of student workflows for reading dense papers.

### Noteable

Noteable distributed a hosted notebook environment that the plugin could write to. A user could ask ChatGPT to load a CSV, build pandas dataframes, train a small scikit-learn model, or plot results, and ChatGPT would author the cells and execute them in the user's Noteable workspace.[4][16] This sat alongside OpenAI's own Code Interpreter (released in beta in July 2023) but was preferred by users who wanted persistence, sharable notebook URLs, and SQL connectors.[8]

### Link Reader

Link Reader, sometimes credited to gochitchat.ai, accepted any public URL and returned cleaned text, including from PDFs, PowerPoint files, Word documents, and image OCR.[17] Researchers used it for arXiv preprints, university press releases, and news coverage. The plugin was later removed from the official store before the broader plugin shutdown.[17]

### Show Me Diagrams

Show Me Diagrams, an open-source plugin, let ChatGPT emit and render diagrams in formats including Mermaid, GraphViz, PlantUML, D2, and Vega-Lite.[18] It became popular for explaining algorithms, system architectures, biological pathways, and historical timelines without leaving the chat.

### Consensus

Consensus joined the plugin store in late September 2023, comparatively late in the plugin era.[9][19] It surfaced relevant peer-reviewed papers from a database described at launch as more than 200 million records, returned cited summaries, and supported "yes/no with evidence" question patterns.[9] Consensus later transitioned into one of the more visible custom GPTs after the GPT Store opened.[19]

## How did researchers combine these plugins?

Common plugin combinations followed a pattern of search, read, compute:

1. A graduate student asked ScholarAI for the five most cited recent papers on a topic.
2. They passed one of those PDFs to AskYourPDF or ChatWithPDF and requested a structured summary covering methods, dataset, and limitations.
3. They asked Wolfram to verify a derivation in the paper or to recompute a reported statistic with corrected inputs.
4. They used Show Me Diagrams to draw the model architecture or experimental flow.
5. They moved final analysis into Noteable or Code Interpreter to test the paper's claims on their own data.

This pattern foreshadowed the agentic research tools that became common after 2024 and demonstrated the value of [retrieval augmented generation](/wiki/retrieval_augmented_generation) over relying on a frozen training corpus. It also pushed users into deliberate [prompt engineering](/wiki/prompt_engineering) habits: explicit instructions to cite, to refuse if no source was found, and to surface tool errors rather than guess.

## How do GPTs and custom GPTs replace plugins?

At OpenAI DevDay on November 6, 2023, OpenAI announced [GPTs](/wiki/gpts), customizable versions of ChatGPT that combined a system prompt, optional knowledge files, and "Actions" (the same OpenAPI-based mechanism that backed plugins).[10] The framing was explicit: GPTs were the next generation of the plugin idea, with a friendlier authoring experience and a built-in distribution channel. The [GPT Store](/wiki/gpt_store) opened on January 10, 2024.[11]

Many academic-research plugin teams ported their offerings:

* Wolfram became the Wolfram GPT, available at gpt.wolfram.com.[13]
* ScholarAI shipped the ScholarAI GPT, retaining the same retrieval backend.
* Consensus released Consensus GPT and moved promotion of its Plus-tier features into the GPT Store listing.[19]
* AskYourPDF, ChatWithPDF-style functionality, and Noteable each released GPT or Action equivalents.
* SciSpace, which had not been a major plugin presence, gained traction in the GPT Store with SciSpace GPT for literature review.

## Why were ChatGPT plugins deprecated?

OpenAI announced the wind-down of plugins in early 2024, citing better developer ergonomics and a clearer commercial path under GPTs.[12] Specific factors included:

* Plugin discovery was poor. The store was a flat list with limited search and no ratings, so users often did not know which research plugin was authoritative.
* The three-plugins-per-chat limit pushed users to choose between, for example, ScholarAI and Wolfram in a single session.
* Plugins required a developer to host an external server and maintain an OpenAPI manifest. GPTs allowed lighter no-code authoring while still permitting Actions for advanced users.
* OpenAI wanted to consolidate around the GPT Store as a marketplace where it could later share revenue with creators (announced in 2024).[11]

Users who depended on plugin-driven research workflows were given roughly three weeks of notice between the March 19, 2024 freeze and the April 9, 2024 final shutdown.[12]

## What replaced academic research plugins?

Research workflows that once ran on plugins largely migrated to four kinds of tools:

1. Custom GPTs in the GPT Store, including Wolfram GPT, ScholarAI GPT, Consensus GPT, SciSpace GPT, and various PDF-question-answering GPTs. See [GPTs](/wiki/gpts).
2. Standalone academic-AI products such as Elicit, Consensus, SciSpace, Scite, and Semantic Scholar's research assistant features, which had been growing in parallel and absorbed many former plugin users.
3. Native ChatGPT capabilities. Browsing, file uploads, Code Interpreter (later renamed Advanced Data Analysis), connectors, and [deep research](/wiki/deep_research) covered the same ground, removing the need for separate plugins for PDF reading, web fetching, and Python execution.
4. Model Context Protocol servers and similar tool interfaces, which let third-party services be exposed to multiple chat models rather than only ChatGPT.

## How did academic plugins relate to other plugin categories?

The academic research category overlapped with several others on the plugin platform:

* Productivity plugins (Zapier, Slack) were sometimes used to send paper summaries to a project tracker.
* Browsing-style plugins (Link Reader, WebPilot) were classified by some indexes as research tools because most browsing was used for reading articles.
* Education plugins overlapped almost completely with the research category for student users.

For the broader history of the platform that hosted these tools, see [chatgpt plugins](/wiki/chatgpt_plugins). For the canonical category map of the live era, see [chatgpt plugin categories](/wiki/chatgpt_plugin_categories).

## See also

* [ChatGPT](/wiki/chatgpt)
* [ChatGPT Plugins](/wiki/chatgpt_plugins)
* [ChatGPT Plugin Categories](/wiki/chatgpt_plugin_categories)
* [GPTs](/wiki/gpts)
* [Custom GPTs](/wiki/custom_gpts)
* [GPT Store](/wiki/gpt_store)
* [OpenAI](/wiki/openai)
* [GPT-4](/wiki/gpt-4)
* [Deep Research](/wiki/deep_research)
* [Retrieval Augmented Generation](/wiki/retrieval_augmented_generation)
* [Prompt Engineering](/wiki/prompt_engineering)

## References

1. OpenAI. "ChatGPT plugins." March 23, 2023. https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-plugins/
2. TechCrunch. "OpenAI connects ChatGPT to the internet." March 23, 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/23/openai-connects-chatgpt-to-the-internet/
3. The Decoder. "OpenAI rolls out more than 70 ChatGPT plugins including Internet access." 2023. https://the-decoder.com/openai-rolls-out-more-than-70-chatgpt-plugins-including-internet-access/
4. Noteable / PR Newswire. "Noteable Launches ChatGPT Plugin Revolutionizing Access to Data Analysis Regardless of Technical Ability." May 11, 2023. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/noteable-launches-chatgpt-plugin-revolutionizing-access-to-data-analysis-regardless-of-technical-ability-301821663.html
5. Mudunuri, S. "Introducing the ScholarAI plugin for ChatGPT: Instant access to peer-reviewed articles with citations." Substack, May 2023. https://shashim.substack.com/p/introducing-the-scholarai-plugin
6. AskYourPDF Docs. "How to Install and Use AskYourPDF Plugin for ChatGPT." 2023. https://docs.askyourpdf.com/askyourpdf-docs/how-to-install-and-use-askyourpdf-plugin-for-chatgpt
7. ChatGPT Guide. "How to use the ChatwithPDF ChatGPT Plugin." May 23, 2023. https://www.chatgptguide.ai/2023/05/23/how-to-use-the-chatpdf-chatgpt-plugin/
8. BigDATAwire. "OpenAI Releases ChatGPT Code Interpreter, 'Your Personal Data Analyst'." July 11, 2023. https://www.bigdatawire.com/2023/07/11/openai-releases-chatgpt-code-interpreter-your-personal-data-analyst/
9. Consensus. "Accessing the Consensus ChatGPT Plugin." 2023. https://consensus.app/home/blog/accessing-the-consensus-chatgpt-plugin/
10. OpenAI. "Introducing GPTs." November 6, 2023. https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpts/
11. VentureBeat. "OpenAI launches GPT Store but revenue sharing is still to come." January 10, 2024. https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-launches-gpt-store-but-revenue-sharing-is-still-to-come
12. OpenAI Developer Community. "Plugin Store and New Chats With Plugins Closed March 19 2024." 2024. https://community.openai.com/t/plugin-store-and-new-chats-with-plugins-closed-march-19-2024/689877
13. Wolfram, S. "ChatGPT Gets Its 'Wolfram Superpowers'!" Stephen Wolfram Writings, March 23, 2023. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/chatgpt-gets-its-wolfram-superpowers/
14. Digital Journal. "The ScholarAI plugin for ChatGPT: Instant access to peer-reviewed articles with citations." 2023. https://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/news/binary-news-network/the-scholarai-plugin-for-chatgpt-instant-access-to-peer-reviewed-articles-with-citations
15. AskYourPDF blog. "The Best PDF Plugin for ChatGPT." 2023. https://askyourpdf.com/blog/the-best-pdf-plugin-for-chatgpt
16. KDnuggets. "Noteable Plugin: The ChatGPT Plugin That Automates Data Analysis." June 2023. https://www.kdnuggets.com/2023/06/noteable-plugin-chatgpt-plugin-automates-data-analysis.html
17. plugin.surf. "Link Reader ChatGPT plugin information, latest updates, and reviews." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/link-reader
18. GitHub. "bra1nDump/show-me-chatgpt-plugin: Create and edit diagrams in ChatGPT." 2023. https://github.com/bra1nDump/show-me-chatgpt-plugin
19. Consensus. "Introducing: Consensus GPT, Your AI Research Assistant." 2023. https://consensus.app/home/blog/introducing-researchgpt-by-consensus/
20. TechXplore. "ChatGPT and ScholarAI: Cardiothoracic research through artificial intelligence without hallucinations." August 2023. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-08-chatgpt-scholarai-cardiothoracic-artificial-intelligence.html
21. OpenAI Developer Community. "Error: Plugins are no longer supported." 2024. https://community.openai.com/t/error-plugins-are-no-longer-supported/715523