Research Notes
AI-powered PDF reader highlight text, get explanations.
What it does
Research Notes is a free, open-source tool for reading academic papers and dense documents with AI assistance. Most PDF readers let you highlight. Research Notes makes those highlights intelligent. The AI reads your entire paper upfront, so every explanation is grounded in the full context, not just one sentence. Highlight to explain, ask questions, attach diagrams, or chat freely. Notes auto-save and link back to exact pages. Export as PDF, Word, or Markdown. Free with Groq, Gemini, or Ollama.
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- EEExplainpaper – Explain jargon in academic papers with GPT-32022 · explainpaper.com · ▲223
heyo! Explainpaper lets you upload a research paper PDF. If you don't understand a formula or sentence, just highlight it and the tool explains it for you I built this a few weeks ago to help me read a neuroscience paper, and it works pretty well! I didn't fine-tune GPT-3, but I do take a lot of context from the paper and feed that into the prompt (not the whole paper). Ppl have uploaded AI, biology, economics, philosophy papers and even law documents. Works in Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French and more as well!

- SPSioyek – PDF viewer for reading research papers and textbooks2022 · github.com · ▲238
Some of the features: * Quickly preview or jump to figures/references/equations/etc. (even if the PDF doesn't have links) * Search paper names in google scholar by middle clicking on their name * Searchable table of contents * Searchable highlights/bookmarks * Browser-like history navigation * Mark locations for quick navigation (Vim style) * Synctex support Video demo of some features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTmCI0Xp5vI

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