Prototype to product-grade frontend

A research workspace for ingesting, exploring, and reasoning over academic papers.

PaperLens brings search, reading, concept mapping, flashcards, and corpus-grounded chat into one deliberate environment instead of spreading the workflow across notebooks, PDFs, and external tools.

Why this version exists

Preserve the proven Streamlit workflows, but give them better structure, motion, and room to grow.

Papers workspace

Responsive filter rail, persistent bookmarks, embedded PDF preview, and richer knowledge views.

Study surfaces

Mind maps use an explorable graph canvas; flashcards become a focused deck instead of a static widget.

Research paper repository

Browse ingested papers, filter by research category, inspect processing status, and keep frequently referenced work close at hand.

Structured knowledge access

Generate concept maps and study flashcards directly from indexed chunks to move from reading to synthesis faster.

Retrieval-augmented chat

Ask questions over the corpus with source-aware responses, configurable retrieval depth, and live streaming output.

What is PaperLens?

PaperLens is a research-focused workspace designed to organize, explore, and reason over academic papers efficiently.

Instead of juggling PDFs, notes, and retrieval tools, PaperLens keeps ingestion, search, reading, and grounded reasoning in one system.
The frontend stays intentionally thin and delegates all search, generation, and storage concerns to backend services through typed proxy routes.

System architecture

The UI mirrors the current backend topology and stays stateless outside local browser preferences like bookmarks.

FastAPI for APIs and RAG orchestration
PostgreSQL for metadata and structured storage
OpenSearch for retrieval and semantic search
Airflow for ingestion and scheduled workflows
Next.js for the upgraded research workstation UI