Sourcely

AI source-finder that scans your draft and pulls citable academic papers to back each claim.

Freemium· Free tier; Ultra $19/mo, Max $39/mo (annual)Writing

Best for

Pick Sourcely if you've drafted an essay and need a fast way to backfill credible academic citations without trawling databases by hand.

Skip if

Skip it if you want a full reference manager, need disclosed model provenance, or are doing original lit-review work where source discovery is the point.

Sourcely is an AI research assistant aimed at students and academics who need to find credible citations for arguments they've already written. You paste an essay or paragraph in, and it scans a corpus it claims contains 200M+ research papers, flags passages that need a citation, and surfaces matching sources with summaries, free-PDF links where available, and one-click export in 700+ citation styles.

What differentiates it from a generic Google Scholar search is the draft-first workflow: instead of you hunting for sources, the tool reads your text and reverse-engineers what to cite. Pricing is straightforward freemium-to-paid, with Ultra at $19/mo (30 'deep searches') and Max at $39/mo (1,000 deep searches) on annual billing. There's a library for saving sources and filters for year, author, and relevance.

The underlying model isn't disclosed, and the 'deep search' quota means heavy users on the lower tier will hit the cap quickly. It's a focused utility rather than a full reference manager â€” expect to still use Zotero or similar for long-term library work, and to sanity-check every recommended source for actual relevance.

Editor's take

A genuinely useful narrow tool: the 'paste your draft, get citations' loop is a real student pain point that generic search engines don't solve well. We'd like more transparency about the model and the 200M-paper corpus, but at $19/mo it's a sensible buy for undergrads racing a deadline.

— The AI Tool Bible editorial team