Free AI Academic Research Tools Compared (2026): QieWen vs AMiner vs iFlow vs QinYan vs Bohrium

The most expensive part of literature review is not your time — it is the databases. CNKI (Zhongwen) costs about ¥6 per downloaded paper, and institutional Web of Science subscriptions run into tens of thousands of dollars a year, well beyond what a student can afford. In September 2026 I checked the official pages and public listings of five AI academic-research tools and only report numbers I verified: QieWen Free = 3 deep searches/day + 50 academic Q&A/day + a 50,000-character AI index (about 10 papers) + 1GB storage, AMiner = free search across 320M papers, 60M scholars, 160M patents, iFlow = free close-reading of ~30M papers (Nature, IEEE, ArXiv), QinYan = free start with 95%+ one-click batch literature download, Bohrium = free campus-network login (CARSI) at 1,000+ Chinese universities. Paid tiers: QieWen ¥30–105/month; the other four keep core search free with no personal subscription wall. Bottom line up front: pick QieWen if you want clearly-defined free limits, AMiner for the largest corpus, iFlow for reading papers, and Bohrium if you are on a campus network doing science computing.

Quick look: free tiers of the five tools

Tool	Free tier	Data scale	Key free limits	Paid price
QieWen (FudanNLP, qiewenpaper.com)	Unlimited quick search + 3 deep searches/day + 50 Q&A/day + 50k-char AI index (~10 papers) + 1GB storage	360M-paper corpus	Free index is only 50k characters; deep Q&A capped at 50/day; upgrade required beyond that	Plus ¥30/mo (20 deep searches/day, 200 Q&A/day, 1M-char index ~200 papers, 10GB); Pro ¥105/mo (unlimited everything, 50GB, unlimited AI Survey)
AMiner (Tsinghua + Zhipu GLM-4.5, aminer.cn)	Academic search, AI dialogue, AI reading and Contemplation (auto-report) generation — all free, no subscription wall	320M papers, 60M scholars, 160M patents, 10B+-edge knowledge graph	"Contemplation" (literature-review / proposal reports) has daily usage caps; some deep-export features need real-name account	Core search free; institutional intelligence subscriptions billed annually
iFlow (Alibaba, iflow.cn)	Free with phone-number signup: academic Q&A, AI close reading, translation, personal knowledge base, podcast generation	~30M papers (Nature, IEEE, ArXiv)	Deep-reasoning / multi-turn thinking has frequency limits for free users (check in-app)	Core free; no published personal subscription tier
QinYan (qinyanai.com)	Free start: AI topic selection, literature search, AI PPT, knowledge base, desktop app + browser extension	95%+ one-click batch literature download rate; official claims: -60% topic-selection cycle, -80% search time, +70% review efficiency	Advanced agent tasks (QinyanClaw autonomous runs) have limited free quota, check in-app	Core free; team collaboration tiers — check official site
Bohrium (DeepVerse + AISI, bohrium.com)	Campus CARSI login for 1,000+ universities, free; personal email signup also works	200+ research apps (literature, data analysis, scientific plotting), 60+ AI-for-Science courses	Some high-compute / experiment apps carry resource quotas; oriented to AI-for-Science workflows	Core free; institutional "research acceleration" plans priced per university

The free tiers differ wildly. QieWen is the only one that publishes hard numbers ("how many per day, how many characters, how many GB"), so it is the most plan-able. AMiner's corpus (320M papers) is an order of magnitude larger than iFlow's (~30M). iFlow wins on reading experience: select any paragraph and get summary, translation or term-explanation saved to notes. QinYan turns "download success rate 95%" into a headline metric — it targets the pain of finding full-text PDFs. Bohrium is the only platform covering the full "read literature → run computation → run experiment" loop, and the barrier is a science background.

QieWen: the clearest free limits — 3 deep searches + 50 Q&A per day

QieWen (切问学术) is an AI research agent from the FudanNLP team — the domestic counterpart of WisPaper — that retrieves from a 360M-paper corpus. Its free plan is the most precisely defined of the five:

• Unlimited quick search — keyword retrieval at will;
• 3 deep searches per day — natural-language queries where the AI interprets your research intent;
• 50 academic Q&A per day — literature-grounded answers; the tap out once you hit 50;
• 50,000-character AI index (~10 papers) — that is the total corpus a free account can have the model "read";
• 1GB storage — personal literature-library cap;
• Plus one-click translation that preserves formulas, charts and typesetting, and paper-subscription push for your field.

Free signup needs no credit card. For more headroom, Plus is ¥30/month: deep search up to 20/day, Q&A up to 200/day, 1M-character index (~200 papers), 10GB storage, subscriptions included; Pro is ¥105/month: unlimited deep search and Q&A, full-corpus index, 50GB, and unlimited AI Survey (automated literature reviews). For a grad student doing daily scouting, the free 3 deep searches/day is plenty; jump to Plus only when you start systematic reviews.

AMiner: 320M papers, free search, the largest database

AMiner (aminer.cn domestically, aminer.org internationally) is a scientific-intelligence platform with its own IP, and the biggest data footprint of the five: 60M scholars, 320M papers, 160M patents in a hundred-billion-edge knowledge graph. The new generation runs on Zhipu's GLM-4.5 / GLM-4.5 Air. Core features are free:

• Academic search: simple keyword search + intelligent natural-language multi-entity queries, both free;
• AMiner Contemplation: built for literature reviews, research proposals and industry reports — it simulates the reasoning flow and produces a structured report with proper citations; subject to daily caps;
• AI dialogue: Q&A grounded in the academic corpus or your personal library, preferring high-value papers;
• AI reading: upload a paper and it auto-generates research-question keywords, abstract and section digests with multimodal parsing;
• Academic space: manage personal literature, subscriptions and knowledge in one place, with daily pushes via mini-program or email.

There is no personal subscription wall — the search and reading pipeline is entirely free. For cross-disciplinary work (how a method evolved from materials to biology, say), AMiner's scholar–paper–patent graph is the only one of the five that can answer it directly.

iFlow: ~30M papers for free close reading, from Alibaba

iFlow (心流, iflow.cn) is Alibaba's AI search assistant with an academic layer covering ~30M papers across Nature, IEEE and ArXiv. Phone-number signup is free; it ships as web, mobile app and Chrome extension. What you get for free:

• Academic Q&A grounded in the 30M-paper corpus, with visible sources;
• AI close reading: select any paragraph and run summary, translation or term-explanation, saved to notes;
• Citation jumping: click an in-text citation marker to pull the cited paper's abstract without leaving the app;
• Personal knowledge base: upload your own documents and let the AI answer from them;
• Answer-to-podcast: turn text answers into a two-host dialogue podcast;
• Canvas mode: an infinite-canvas board for reports and brainstorming.

iFlow is a "reading" tool: you already have target papers and want to understand them fast, translate side-by-side, and extract the key points. It will not build a search strategy for you; for systematic scouting, QieWen and AMiner are more structured.

QinYan: free to start, 95% batch-literature download is the hook

QinYan (沁言学术, qinyanai.com) is a full-pipeline AI research assistant from topic selection to publication. The official site simply says "start for free", with desktop client, web and browser extension. The numbers worth noting:

• 95%+ one-click batch literature download success rate — the only platform of the five that makes download success rate a metric, aimed squarely at the full-text-hunting pain;
• Official efficiency claims: topic-selection cycle −60%, search time −80%, review efficiency +70% (vendor numbers, self-attested);
• QinyanClaw agent: autonomously plans and executes complex research tasks; chat sits next to the source text, auto-summarizing key points, notes and excerpts;
• AI topic recommendation, literature-review generation, AI PPT, data-analysis mind-maps and team collaboration ("my group") all in one platform.

QinYan's free ceiling needs in-app confirmation after signup (advanced agent tasks usually carry free quotas), but "95% batch download + free start" is a combination the other four do not offer.

Bohrium: free CARSI campus login at 1,000+ universities, the only read–compute–experiment loop

Bohrium (玻尔, bohrium.com) is the AI-for-Science platform from DeepVerse and the Beijing AI for Science Institute (AISI). The core is "Science Navigator": multimodal search across text, charts and molecular structures, with automatic intent parsing. Verified numbers:

• 1,000+ Chinese universities can log in via CARSI campus-network identity for free; personal email signup also works;
• 200+ research apps in its store: literature scouting, data analysis, scientific plotting, with an open developer on-ramp;
• 60+ AI-for-Science courses (materials, chemistry, biomedicine, AI) with interactive notebooks;
• Knowledge base fuses papers, patents and notes; one-click RIS citation export into EndNote or Zotero;
• Web, mobile and desktop in sync.

Bohrium is also the highest hurdle: it targets AI-for-Science (materials, chemistry, biology, scientific computing). For humanities and social science it is a sledgehammer, but for computational chemistry, molecular simulation or bioinformatics it is the only platform of the five that closes the loop from literature to computation to experiment.

Picking by scenario (all-¥0 stack)

• Grad student proposal / literature review: QieWen Free (3 deep searches/day + 50 Q&A/day) as the base; exhaust the 50k-char free index first, then decide if ¥30/mo Plus earns its keep;
• Cross-disciplinary scouting / scholar mapping: AMiner — 320M papers + 60M-scholar graph, fully free, Contemplation writes the review report;
• Reading English papers / translation notes: iFlow — 30M-paper corpus + paragraph-level summarization/translation + podcast generation, all free;
• Hunting full-text PDFs: QinYan — 95%+ batch download, free to start;
• Campus compute/experiment work (chemistry, materials, biology): Bohrium — CARSI login at zero friction, 200+ research apps;
• The full stack: AMiner (search) → iFlow (close reading) → QinYan (full-text download) → QieWen (Q&A-based reviews). Every step at $0, covering the entire pipeline from literature discovery to review drafting.

Notes

Free quotas change with versions: QieWen's "3/day, 50/day, 50k-char index" reflects its September 2026 pricing page and can shift after upgrades; iFlow, QinYan and Bohrium personal free ceilings should be confirmed in-app after signup. Numbers were cross-checked on 2026-09-27 (ai-bot.cn tool entries + official sites); re-verify each platform's pricing page before you rely on it.