Apex Scholar

A unified, AI-powered workspace for academic researchers to explore literature, manage grants, and track knowledge.

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📖 Overview

Apex Scholar bridges the gap between general data management and the specialized workflows of academic researchers. It provides a structured, highly customizable environment to discover literature, visualize conceptual gaps, manage citations, and track funding in a centralized dashboard.

✨ Key Features

• Unified Papers Explorer: Seamlessly search and import papers across ArXiv, Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Google Scholar, CrossRef and PubMed simultaneously.
• Reference Management: Connect & import collections from Zotero and many more coming soon.
• Knowledge Base & Gap Identification: Auto-extract insights from abstracts using AI, and build an interactive 2D Force Graph to visualize relationships and identify novel research gaps.
• Research Journal & Docs: Manage research journal and write thesis, papers using LaTex or Rich Editor.
• Grant & Funding Tracker: Stay on top of proposal deadlines, checklist requirements, document links, and budget spending.
• Citation Engine: Quickly auto-generate citations for your saved literature.
• Kanban Task Board: A drag-and-drop integrated board to map out your literature review, analysis, and data collection phases.
• Cloud Backup & Restore: Encrypted, secure storage via Supabase ensuring your research data is always safe.

🚀 Getting Started

To run Apex Scholar locally on your machine, follow these steps:

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v18 or higher recommended)
• npm or yarn

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/scholarkit/apexscholar.git
   cd apexscholar

2. Install dependencies:

   npm install

3. Environment Setup: Create a .env file in the root directory and add any required API keys (e.g., NCBI, SerpAPI, etc.):

   VITE_PROVIDER=supabase
   SUPABASE_URL=your_supabase_url
   SUPABASE_ANON_KEY=your_supabase_anon_key
   SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY=your_supabase_service_key
   SERPAPI_API_KEY=your_serpapi_key
   NCBI_API_KEY=your_ncbi_key
   GITHUB_TOKEN=your_github_token
   GITHUB_OWNER=scholarkit
   GITHUB_REPO=LaTex
   VITE_ZOTERO_CLIENT_KEY=your_zotero_key
   MOONSHOT_API_KEY=your_moonshot_key  # optional
   SUPERMEMORY_API_KEY=your_supermemory_key
   NODE_ENV=development

4. Start the development server:

   npm run dev

5. Open the App: Navigate to http://localhost:3000 in your browser.

🗺️ Roadmap

We are constantly growing to meet the needs of the academic community. Here's what's on the horizon:

Literature & Citation Management

• Reference Syncing: Native integrations with Mendeley, and EndNote APIs etc.
• PDF Workspace: Upload papers, highlight text, and link annotations directly to your unified knowledge graph.
• Scopus Integration: Adding Scopus to the unified paper explorer.

Deep AI Integrations

• Document Q&A (RAG): "Chat with your PDFs" to instantly summarize methodologies or findings across multiple uploaded papers.
• Auto-Extraction: AI-assisted extraction of tables, statistical values ($p$-values), and sample sizes directly into your dataset.
• Smart Recommendations: Context-aware literature discovery based on your current knowledge gap matrix.

Collaboration & Open Science

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Distinct permissions for Principal Investigators (PIs), Post-Docs, and Research Assistants.
• Data Publishing: 1-click publishing to make specific datasets or interactive visualizations public as supplementary materials.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome and greatly appreciated! If you have suggestions for adding new features or fixing bugs, please open an issue or submit a pull request.

📄 License

This project is open-source. Please see the LICENSE file for more details.

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Built with ❤️ for the research community.