Adding papers
carrel add takes any mix of:
| Source | Example | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| arXiv id or URL | 2006.11239, arXiv:hep-th/9711200, https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.11239v2 | metadata from arXiv’s DOI, the PDF downloaded |
| DOI or URL | 10.1038/nature14539, https://doi.org/…, publisher URLs containing the DOI | metadata from doi.org (Crossref, DataCite, …) |
paper.pdf, '~/Downloads/a paper.pdf' | text extracted; its DOI or arXiv id read from the first page, or else its title looked up | |
| exact title | "Attention Is All You Need" | looked up on Crossref, Semantic Scholar and arXiv |
A title that doesn’t match exactly prints the closest papers with the id to add each by. In the TUI, a with a title shows the results to pick from.
If an arXiv version exists, its PDF is downloaded, while the metadata comes from the published DOI when there is one.
Duplicates
A paper is the same as one in the library when its DOI, its arXiv id or its title (ignoring case, punctuation and accents) matches. Adding it again is refused, except to give a paper without a PDF its PDF.
PDFs later
Papers added by DOI or title can get their PDF afterwards:
carrel attach lecun2015deep ~/Downloads/lecun.pdf
carrel attach kingma2014adam # no file: downloaded from arXiv
In the TUI, p opens a file picker, newest PDFs first.
Supplementary material
carrel addto ho2020denoising appendix.pdf https://example.org/code.zip
Files land in the paper’s supplementary/ folder. PDFs among them get their text extracted next to them (appendix.pdf → appendix.md), which search and your AI can read too. In the TUI: s.
Importing a .bib
carrel import ~/thesis/refs.bib -p thesis --pdfs
Every entry becomes a paper with its key unchanged, so your documents’ citations keep working. Entries already in the library are matched instead, @string macros are expanded, keys that can’t name a folder get a new one (reported), and with --pdfs entries with an arXiv id get their PDF.
When there is no identifier
A PDF without DOI or arXiv id whose title isn’t found still gets added, with its title from the PDF. Tell carrel which paper it is later:
carrel update attention 10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762 # or an arXiv id, or the exact title
carrel rename attention # then a key from the new metadata