AI-powered academic research platform that automates the tedious parts of the research workflow — literature discovery, experiment replication, and paper writing — in a single browser-based IDE.
ScholarFlow takes a research idea and turns it into a complete paper draft by automating the grunt work:
- Literature Search — Finds and ranks relevant papers via OpenAlex, adds them to your library
- Experiment Replication — Runs baseline experiments on cloud GPUs (Modal) to validate prior work
- Novel Experiments — Designs and executes new experiments based on your hypothesis
- Paper Writing — AI drafts sections with proper citations, renders LaTeX to PDF in real-time
| Category | Technologies |
|---|---|
| Frontend | Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4 |
| Editor | CodeMirror 6, LaTeX preview via latex.js |
| Backend | SQLite (local-first), Inngest (background jobs) |
| AI | Claude Sonnet 4 (Anthropic API) |
| Compute | Modal (GPU experiment execution) |
| Search | OpenAlex API (academic paper discovery) |
| UI | shadcn/ui, Radix UI, Streamdown (markdown rendering) |
- LaTeX Editor with live PDF preview and syntax highlighting
- AI Chat with streaming responses and tool call visualization
- Paper Library with relevance scoring and enrichment
- Experiment Workspace with hypothesis tracking, findings, and research logs
- Guided Demo Mode for presentations and walkthroughs
# Install dependencies
npm install
# Set up environment variables
cp .env.example .env.local
# Fill in: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, OPENALEX_API_KEY
# Run the dev server
npm run dev
# In another terminal, start Inngest
npx inngest-cli@latest dev| Variable | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY |
Yes | Claude API key |
OPENALEX_API_KEY |
No | OpenAlex API key (higher rate limits) |
REPRODUCTION_RUNNER_BACKEND |
No | Set to modal for GPU experiments |
REPRODUCTION_MODAL_SUBMIT_URL |
No | Modal worker endpoint |
The app deploys as a single service on Railway:
railway login
railway init
railway upSQLite runs on Railway's persistent disk — no external database needed.
Built for the hackathon by the ScholarFlow team.