📎 Paperclip: Your all-in one Research Companion
Paperclip is an inclusive, AI-powered platform designed to lower barriers for students and accelerate workflows for seasoned researchers. For students, it suggests domains, professors, and simplified papers with accessible starter projects. For researchers, it curates datasets, pretrained models, and GitHub code, generating ready-to-run pipelines. The result? Faster, more inclusive research — and a sustainable future by saving compute, time, and energy.
✨ Key Features Domain Discovery: Helps students find specific research sub-fields within a broad topic.
Paper Summarizer: Fetches and summarizes recent academic papers from ArXiv.
Professor Finder: Locates professors at a specific university based on their research topic.
Dataset & Model Hub: Discovers relevant datasets and pre-trained models from Hugging Face and GitHub.
Starter Code Generator: Creates boilerplate Python code in a Colab-style format to kickstart projects.
Multilingual Support: Translate paper summaries and chat responses into various languages.
Persistent Chat History: Each user's conversation is saved locally in a dedicated SQLite database.
🛠️ Tech Stack Backend: Python, FastAPI, LangChain
Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (No frameworks)
LLM Provider: Cohere (Command R)
Database: SQLite for chat history
External APIs: ArXiv, Semantic Scholar, Hugging Face Hub, GitHub
🚀 Getting Started Follow these instructions to set up and run the project locally.
- Prerequisites Python 3.10 or higher
A virtual environment tool (like venv)
Node.js (for live-server, or use the VS Code Live Server extension)
- Setup and Installation Clone the repository:
Bash
git clone https://github.com/your-username/paperclip-project.git cd paperclip-project Create and activate a Python virtual environment:
Bash
python -m venv venv .\venv\Scripts\activate
python3 -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate Install the required Python libraries:
Bash
pip install -r requirements.txt Create the environment file:
Make a copy of .env.example and name it .env.
Open the .env file and add your secret API keys:
Code snippet
COHERE_API_KEY="your-cohere-api-key" LANGCHAIN_API_KEY="your-langsmith-api-key" # Optional, for tracing GITHUB_TOKEN="your-github-personal-access-token" 3. How to Run You need to run the backend and frontend servers in two separate terminals.
Run the Backend Server:
In your first terminal, run the following command from the project's root directory:
Bash
uvicorn app.main:app --reload The backend will be running at http://127.0.0.1:8000.
Run the Frontend Server:
The easiest method is using the Live Server extension in Visual Studio Code.
Right-click on the index.html file and select "Open with Live Server".
Alternatively, use npx (comes with Node.js):
Bash
npx live-server
Your browser will open to the Paperclip landing page.