See how a review treats its sources, not just which sources it lists.
What this tool does
This tool analyses the context around citations in a literature review. It finds sentences containing citation markers, such as author-year pairs or bracketed numbers, and labels each as praise, critique, or neutral using cue words like influential and rigorous for praise, and flawed and limited for critique. The result shows how a review treats its sources, which is often more revealing than which sources it lists.
It works fully in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server, and you do not need an account. Paste your text, press the button, and read the result on the same page. That makes it useful for students, researchers, and anyone who has to get through a long paper quickly without losing the important parts.
How to use it
Paste a literature review section and press the analyse button. Read the table and look for patterns: a review that only praises is probably uncritical, while one that only criticises may be building a straw case for its own study. Check any surprising label against the original sentence, because cue words can mislead.
Worked example
Three sentences, one calling Smith (2020) influential, one calling Jones (2019) flawed for ignoring age differences, and one neutrally noting Lee (2021) studied sleep in students, become three rows labelled praise, critique, and neutral. The pattern is instantly clear: one source endorsed, one challenged, one merely noted, which is exactly the kind of stance a critical review should show.
How to read the results
The output is a table of sentences with their tone labels, marking sentences without a visible citation marker with an asterisk. Labels come from fixed cue lists, and sentences with no cue words default to neutral. The table is a map of stance, not a verdict on any cited paper.
Do not treat the output as a final answer. It is a starting point for your own reading. Skim the highlighted parts first, then read the full passage around anything that matters for your work. A tool can point at the likely important sentences, but only you can judge whether they are actually important for your question.
Honest limits
This is a heuristic cue classifier, not a reader. Praise and criticism are often expressed without standard cue words, through irony, damning detail, or faint praise, and this tool will miss all of that. It also cannot tell whether a criticism is fair. Use the labels to direct your attention, then read the sentences yourself before characterising any author’s stance.
This tool does not use artificial intelligence, and it does not understand your paper the way a human reader does. It follows fixed rules that you can inspect in the results. That is a strength when you want transparent, repeatable results, and a weakness when a passage needs real understanding, context, or judgement.
Tips for best results
Paste clean text. Remove page headers, footers, and reference lists before you paste, because they add noise to word counts and sentence scores. Work on one section at a time for long papers, and keep your original file open beside the tool so you can check anything surprising against the source. If you use the result in your own writing, always cite the original paper, never the tool output.
Frequently asked questions
Is it free? Yes. The tool is free to use online, with no sign-up and no download.
Is my text stored anywhere? No. Everything runs in your browser tab. Closing the tab removes your pasted text.
Can I trust the output completely? No tool of this kind should be trusted blindly. Use it to speed up reading and checking, then verify the important claims yourself in the original text.
Related tools
Versión en español: Analizador de Contexto de Citas · All Free Online Tools.
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