Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I mapped 8.5M research papers into an interactive atlas
When I read papers, I have to jump between multiple tabs to find the dataset, code, videos, peer reviews, and so on. I tried to fix this with this project. It started as a project just for papers on arXiv, but after its initial success on Twitter (got like 1.9k views: the most I have gotten for a post), I have now expanded it to include other openly available papers from PubMed Central, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and eLife. These papers have been linked with their genes, proteins, diseases, drugs, clinical trials, 3D protein structures, code, and cited and similar papers. This project now has four…
This project maps 8.5 million research papers from arXiv, PubMed Central, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and eLife into an interactive visual atlas. Researchers can click on paper dots to access summaries, key findings, peer… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1IM
As a grad student (and an ADHDer), I had trouble doing literature review systematically. To combat this, I made a website that finds similar papers using the meaning of the thing I am looking for. I used MixedBread's [^1] embedding model to generate vectors from the abstracts. I store and search similar vectors using Milvus [^2] and finally use Gradio [^3] to serve the frontend. I update the vector database weekly by pulling the metadata dataset from Kaggle [^4]. To speed up the search process on my free oracle instance, I binarise the embeddings and use Hamming distance as a metric. I would…
2024 · papermatch.mitanshu.tech · its alternatives →
- 2

Hey HN! I love finding new books to read on here. I wanted to gather the most mentioned books and recreate the serendipity of physical browsing. I scraped 20k comments from HN threads related to reading, extracted the references and opinions using GPT-4o mini, and visualised their embeddings as a map. - OpenAI's embeddings were processed using UMAP and HDBSCAN. A direct 2D projection from the text embeddings didn't yield visually interesting results. Instead, HDBSCAN is first applied on a high-dimensional projection. Those clusters tend to correspond to different genres. The genre…
2024 · hnbooks.pieterma.es · its alternatives →
- 3

Understanding scientific articles can be tough, even in your own field. Trying to comprehend articles from others? Good luck. Enter, Now I Get It! I made this app for curious people. Simply upload an article and after a few minutes you'll have an interactive web page showcasing the highlights. Generated pages are stored in the cloud and can be viewed from a gallery. Now I Get It! uses the best LLMs out there, which means the app will improve as AI improves. Free for now - it's capped at 20 articles per day so I don't burn cash. A few things I (and maybe you will) find interesting: * This is…
Feb 2026 · nowigetit.us · its alternatives →
- 4

Accessible end-to-end deep dive of crawling, embedding, projecting, and semantic searching all of Hacker News for my Hackerverse project.
2024 · blog.wilsonl.in · its alternatives →
- 5RH
Hi Hacker News! I’m a Bayesian statistician that has been working on applying hierarchical mixture models (originally developed for genomics) to structure text data, and in the process, used these models to build (what started as a personal) tool for conducting literature reviews and deep research. My literature review process starts with a broad search to find a few key papers/groups, and from there expands along their citation networks. I needed to conduct a few rounds of literature reviews during the course of my research and decided to build a tool to facilitate this process. The…
Oct 2025 · sturdystatistics.com · its alternatives →
- 6

Hi HN, As a researcher, I often found myself struggling with the limitations of keyword-based search when exploring PubMed papers. To address this, I created PubMed Search (https://www.pubmedisearch.com/), a tool that leverages a vector database to enable semantic search across medical research literature. Some key features: * Daily updates to ensure access to the latest articles * Semantic search using latest & greatest embedding models * Some additional useful info about the papers (tldr, journal, publication date, etc.) Hope you find it useful!
2024 · pubmedisearch.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Embedding Atlas▲150Hey HN, we're happy to release Mycelium, a JavaScript library for creating graph visualizations of machine learning models or any other directed acyclic graphs. Mycelium powers the graph viewer of the Talaria [0] a research model visualization and optimization system, which was used to optimize the efficiency of Apple Foundation Models [1]. Everything works entirely on the client-side in the browser — we provide a rudimentary ONNX loader out of the box, which you can try by dragging model files into our website. It is also simple to define loaders for your own model formats. The library was…
2025 · apple.github.io · its alternatives →
- 8

OpenScholarXIV is an open-source, aesthetic, minimal and AI powered app that allows users to search, read, bookmark, share, download and view summaries of academic papers from the arXiv repository. - ScholarXIV/OpenScholarXIV
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
ArXivTok▲105I made this, and it's fully open source so if someone wants to contribute here you have the url: https://github.com/Miguel07Alm/arxivtok. For this project I was inspired by https://wikitok.vercel.app.
2025 · arxivtok.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 10KG
Hi HN! My latest side project is knowledge graph that maps the French culinary network using data extracted from restaurant reviews from LeFooding.com. The project uses LLMs to extract structured information from unstructured text. Some technical aspects you may be interested in: - Used structured generation to reliably parse unstructured text into a consistent schema - Tested multiple models (Mistral-7B-v0.3, Llama3.2-3B, gpt4o-mini) for information extraction - Created an interactive visualization using gephi-lite and Retina (WebGL) - Built (with Claude) a simple Flask web app to clean and…
2025 · theophilecantelob.re · its alternatives →
- 11

Hello HN, Talk2Arxiv is a small open-source RAG application I've been building for a few weeks. To use it just prepend any arxiv.org link with 'talk2' to load the paper into a responsive RAG chat application (e.g. www.arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 -> www.talk2arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762). All implementation details are in the GitHub. Currently, because I've opted to extract text from the PDF of the paper rather than reading the LaTeX source code (since I wanted to build a more generic PDF RAG in the process), it struggles with symbolic text / mathematics, and sometimes fails…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12AF
Hey HN! I've always found it hard to keep up with the latest AI research, so I built Arxiv Feed! https://arxiv-feed.vercel.app/ It's basically a feed of AI research papers + a one-liner explaining what problem its solving, etc. You can also click on any paper to get a TL;DR. Right now, I've only indexed a few hundred large language model papers, but will expand to indexing AI papers in other topics. Thinking of also adding a way for people to up-vote/down-vote papers. Would love to hear any thoughts/feedback! :D Thanks!
2023 · arxiv-feed.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 13

Hey HN! This has been my project for a few years now. I recently brought it back to life after taking a pause to focus on my studies. My goal with this project is to separate fluff from science when shopping for supplements. I am doing this in 3 steps: 1.) I index every supplement on the market (extract each ingredient, normalize by quantity) 2.) I index every research paper on supplementation (rank every claim by effect type and effect size) 3.) I link data between supplements and research papers Earlier last year, I took pause on a project because I've ran into a few issues: Legal: Shady…
Jan 2026 · pillser.com · its alternatives →
- 14

Built an automated system to run a deep search of ArXiv and carefully find all the precise papers that exist on a complex topic. It's different from simple RAG because it searches, classifies, and adapts based on relevant papers it uncovers, and then continues until it finds every paper on a topic (trying to mimic the human research process). Benchmarked 10x higher accuracy and total retrieval compared to Google Scholar for a median search (whitepaper on website). Also knows when it is complete, and misses virtually nothing (< 3% or so, once it's converged). Website has a free trial and a…
2024 · app.undermind.ai · its alternatives →
- 15SC
2024 · app.airtrain.ai · its alternatives →
- 16IR
I’ve been frustrated with PDFs and found arXiv HTML lacking, so I built a fully interactive paper reader. Features: • Hover references, citations, equations • Light/dark mode • Auto-generated dependency graphs for definitions/lemmas/theorems • Table of contents that syncs with scroll • Highlighting + annotations • “Copy raw LaTeX” anywhere Featured paper: Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners (Veo 3) https://www.sciencestack.ai/arxiv/2509.20328v2
Nov 2025 · sciencestack.ai · its alternatives →
- 17
arXiv-news▲11Hey HN! I built arXiv News (https://arxiv-news.com) – a discussion space for research papers. The problem: I browse arXiv constantly for new papers, but there's nowhere good to discuss them. Twitter is chaotic, Reddit is fragmented, and arXiv itself has no comments. So I cloned HN's design (using https://github.com/clintonwoo/hackernews-react-graphql) and applied it to arXiv. Upvote papers, comment, sort by hot/new/discussed, filter by category, post ideas/papers you've found. A daily scraper pulls all new papers automatically. I'd love to hear…
2025 · arxiv-news.com · its alternatives →
- 18

We can now build drastically higher quality search because we can use LLMs in algorithms that mimic a human's systematic research process, instead of just roughly recommending results based on semantic embeddings or term frequency. We built a deep search LLM pipeline that takes a few minutes to carefully search all the scientific literature. You describe your complex goal, as you would to a colleague. Then, we carefully search 200M+ papers. We classify the preliminary results with GPT-4. We then adapt the search goals based on relevant/irrelevant papers uncovered and continue searching,…
2024 · undermind.ai · its alternatives →
- 19IB
I've been working on nodes.bio - an interactive tool for visualizing biological networks and systems thinking. The tool features interactive network visualization powered by Cytoscape.js, with real-time graph editing and manipulation capabilities. It supports JSON import/export and provides a responsive design that works seamlessly on the desktop (mobile-friendly version coming later). The tech stack combines modern frontend technologies with robust backend architecture. The frontend uses Next.js 14 with TypeScript and Cytoscape.js for the visualization engine. The backend is built with…
2025 · nodes.bio · its alternatives →
- 20

So, I spend a ton of time on arXiv, like probably most of you. And while it's obviously amazing for keeping up with new papers, I always found the actual searching and browsing part a bit... clunky? Especially when you're trying to quickly figure out if a paper is even worth diving into. I got a bit fed up with it, so I ended up building this little web app called ArxivLens (https://arxivlens.com/). My main goal was to make it way quicker to skim papers and find what you're actually looking for. The big thing I added that I think is pretty useful is an AI overview feature.…
2025 · arxivlens.com · its alternatives →
- 21

A free topographic map of the latest 10M+ research papers
May 2026 · globalresearchspace.com · its alternatives →
- 22IL
I built a tool for academics and practitioners that turns literature reviews into interactive, visual experiences. Upload PDFs and HTML sources, and AI creates a knowledge map showing how everything connects. What it does: - Upload research papers (PDFs) and web sources (HTML) - AI generates interactive knowledge maps from your sources - Skim read at a high level or read per-source/section summaries - Expand/build further specific sections of the map that interest you - Read original sources in context - Ask questions about the research and get contextual answers I have curated…
2025 · proread.ai · its alternatives →
- 23AV
I found myself jumping between ChatGPT, tabs, and docs, but never building real understanding. This is my attempt at fixing that — for researchers, curious readers, and lifelong learners. Would love your thoughts on the interface, and whether this would be useful in your own work or otherwise.
2025 · proread.ai · its alternatives →
- 24TA
I created this tool over the weekend because, as someone interested in AI and technology, I find many research papers on arXiv fascinating but often incredibly dense and difficult to understand due to the heavy jargon and technical language. I wanted to make these complex topics more accessible to laypeople like myself by converting the topics described in these papers into full-length books that break down key concepts, making cutting-edge research easier to grasp. You can think of it as generating prerequisite reading materials before being able to read the actual paper. Here are some…
2024 · instabooks.ai · its alternatives →
Also compare
- I made a website to semantically search ArXiv papers alternatives
- I mapped HN's favorite books with GPT-4o alternatives
- Now I Get It – Translate scientific papers into interactive webpages alternatives
- Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun alternatives
- Research Hacker News, ArXiv & Google with Hierarchical Bayesian Models alternatives
- I put PubMed in a vector DB alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →