PaperLens
Hey HN, I built PaperLens ([thepaperlens.com](https://thepaperlens.com/)) after one too many frustrating sessions trying to find what I actually needed in academic research. Whether I was doing a literature review, trying to quickly find a solid source to back up a point in a discussion, or just attempting to understand a complex subject, traditional keyword searches often felt like searching for a needle in a haystack. PaperLens uses RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and the latest AI models to provide more precise, semantic search results. It also has an AI chatbot that…
PaperLens launched on January 2, 2025 with 11 votes, #1,388 of 6,141 launches that month and more than 50% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
What it does
Your AI-powered lens into the world of research papers. Search through research papers using natural language or verify scientific claims with supporting evidence.
Your AI-powered lens into the world of research papers
AI answers grounded in millions of peer-reviewed papers. Get evidence-backed answers in seconds so you can answer with authority. Powerful tools designed to help you find, understand, and organize scientific literature faster than ever. Unlike ChatGPT, every answer is grounded in real papers. See evidence strength, consensus, key findings, and limitations. All in seconds. Follow-up questions, paper deep-dives, and real-time web search. One conversation replaces a dozen open tabs. Build your library and generate structured wiki summaries for any paper: findings, methods, limitations, and more. Filter by date, quality, and source to surface the most relevant, credible research. No more wading…from thepaperlens.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN, I built PaperLens ([thepaperlens.com](https://thepaperlens.com/)) after one too many frustrating sessions trying to find what I actually needed in academic research. Whether I was doing a literature review, trying to quickly find a solid source to back up a point in a discussion, or just…
Does a similar job
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Open Paper2025 · openpaper.ai · ▲289Hi HN! Open Paper allows you to annotate and understand your research papers with an AI copilot. I wanted a paper-reading assistant that let met actually dig into papers in-place while benefiting from AI tooling. When it comes to studying, I'm not a fan of the typical chat interfaces that obfuscate uploaded files and turn them into black box 'content'. Hence, I've implemented a split-pane view. To mitigate the risk of hallucinations, all AI responses come with grounded citations that refer back to the source material in-flow. Some feature highlights: - Actually read your papers in one place…
MyLens.ai2025 · mylens.ai · ▲354MyLens.AI is a free AI that generates a beautiful timeline of key events for any topic you're interested in, all with one click. It is great to combine multiple topics and view their overlapping events in one cohesive timeline. One Timeline, Many Histories. Website: https://mylens.ai Your feedback is much appreciated.
- IMI made a website to semantically search ArXiv papers2024 · papermatch.mitanshu.tech · ▲324
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…


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