Research Lei Explanation

Research Lei is a personal research paper library manager. Instead of bookmarks, browser tabs, or scattered PDFs on your hard drive, it lets you build a searchable, organized collection of academic papers. You add papers by title, and the system automatically fetches metadata, citations, references, and the PDF itself—then displays everything in a clean web interface you can browse locally.

The workflow is straightforward. You run a command like python addpaper.py name building rome in a day to search for a paper by title keywords. The system queries Microsoft Academic Search (a structured database of academic papers) and presents you with matches. You pick the right one, confirm whether you want to download its citations and references too, and it saves all that data as a JSON file. Then you open a web page in your browser that reads that file and displays your growing library—papers you can click through, see metadata for, and organize.

The main appeal is convenience and discoverability. Researchers accumulate papers constantly—from reading, from recommendations, from following citation chains. Manually managing PDFs and keeping track of what you've read is tedious. This tool automates the discovery and storage part, so you spend less time wrestling with files and more time actually reading and connecting ideas. You can also extract keywords from papers and later use that for topic modeling or similarity rankings, though the README doesn't go into detail on those features.

The tradeoff is that it relies on Microsoft Academic Search rather than Google Scholar. Scholar is more complete and familiar to most academics, but it doesn't expose an easy API and actively blocks scraping. Microsoft's database is smaller, especially for very recent papers, but it provides structured data (abstracts, references, author lists) that makes the system possible. The code is also tied to Python 2.7 and optional tools like ImageMagick and pdftotext, so setup isn't completely plug-and-play—you may need to install dependencies depending on what features you want.