Sourcely

You paste your draft text (an essay, paragraph, or paper section), and Sourcely's AI analyzes the claims and searches a corpus of over 200 million academic papers to find relevant sources. It surfaces paper suggestions, abstracts, and formatted citations in APA, MLA, or other styles. The result is a working-draft-to-citation pipeline that's especially useful for students writing essays who need to back up claims fast.

Sourcely has a free tier that covers up to 300 characters of input with no commitment, plus a limited number of searches and the core research tools. Paid plans are Ultra at $11/month billed annually on Sourcely's current summer sale ($19/month list), which includes 30 deep searches a month, and Max at $23/month billed annually ($39/month list), which includes 1,000 deep searches a month. Month-to-month billing costs more. The $7 one-time trial and the $347 lifetime plan Sourcely sold in May 2026 are no longer offered.

Sourcely is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students writing essays, term papers, and dissertations on tight deadlines. It's less suited to professional researchers running formal systematic reviews, those use tools like Elicit or Consensus. If your main problem is 'I wrote this paragraph, now I need credible sources to back it up,' Sourcely solves that specific pain in seconds.

No. Sourcely only finds sources, it doesn't write text for you. This is actually a feature, not a limitation: because Sourcely works with your own writing, there's no AI-generated content in the final document, which avoids many of the academic integrity concerns that tools like Jenni AI or ChatGPT raise. You write the argument, Sourcely finds the evidence.

Sourcely pulls from a massive academic database and uses AI matching to rank suggestions. Accuracy varies by discipline, STEM fields tend to get cleaner matches than niche humanities topics. Always verify each suggested citation by opening the source paper and confirming it supports your claim. Sourcely provides abstracts and links to make this verification fast, but you're still responsible for the final judgment.

Sourcely is primarily a web app where you paste text and receive suggested sources with formatted citations you can copy into your document. It doesn't have native Word or Google Docs plugins, so the workflow is manual copy-paste rather than in-line citation insertion. For a more integrated experience, pair Sourcely with Zotero or Mendeley for citation storage and formatting.

Yes, for many of the sources it recommends, Sourcely provides direct PDF download links when the source is open access or freely available. For paywalled papers, it links to the publisher page. This is useful for students who want to read source material directly before citing it, and avoids the need to search separately on Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar for each reference.

Sourcely's value depends on your workflow. For students writing multiple essays with tight deadlines, the time saved searching Google Scholar manually can justify $11/month. For researchers with existing literature search workflows or access to Semantic Scholar and Elicit, free tools probably suffice. The unique selling point is the 'paste draft, get sources' flow, which no free tool replicates as directly.