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carrel

A research paper library for you and your AI.

Add papers by PDF, DOI, arXiv id or title. carrel finds their metadata, turns each PDF into text and figures an AI can read, keeps a .bib file for every paper, and lets an AI search, read and summarize your library, with you approving what it writes.

carrel add 2006.11239 · carrel search diffusion author:ho · carrel bib -p thesis > refs.bib

A carrel is the private study desk in a university library.

What it does

  • Add papers by PDF, DOI, arXiv id or title, or import a .bib from a LaTeX project, Zotero or JabRef. Metadata comes from doi.org, Crossref, Semantic Scholar and arXiv; arXiv PDFs are downloaded.
  • Plain files you own. Each paper is a folder named by its citation key, holding <key>.bib, <key>.pdf, the extracted text and figures, your notes and supplementary material. Sync it, put it in git, edit it by hand.
  • Readable by AI. Every PDF becomes fulltext.md plus figures/, so an assistant can read papers without PDF tools of its own.
  • AI writes drafts, you decide. Summaries, keywords and notes an AI proposes wait in drafts/ until you approve them.
  • Projects and bibliographies. Group papers into projects, keep them in sync with the citations in your LaTeX or Typst files, and get each project’s .bib in one command.
  • Search everything with a full-text index over titles, authors, keywords, abstracts, summaries, notes and full texts, with field filters like author: and year:.
  • Follow citations: the references and the citing papers of any paper, marked when they are already in your library.
  • A TUI, a CLI and an MCP server on one core library, so other frontends can follow.

How it fits together

        you                         your AI assistant
         │                                  │
   TUI · CLI                         MCP server (carrel mcp)
         └──────────────┬───────────────────┘
                        │
                 carrel library  ── doi.org, Crossref, Semantic Scholar, arXiv
                        │
   ~/Documents/carrel/<key>/<key>.bib, <key>.pdf, fulltext.md, figures/, summary.md, notes.md, drafts/

Start with Installation and the Quick start.