gitwtfhub

wtf is researchlei?

karpathy/researchlei — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-07-18 · repo last pushed 2013-05-03

★ 274PythonAudience · researcherComplexity · 3/5DormantSetup · moderate

TL;DR

A personal library manager for academic papers that fetches metadata, citations, and PDFs automatically and displays your growing collection in a local web page.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    What it does
      Search papers by title
      Fetch metadata and PDFs
      Browse local library page
    Tech stack
      Python
      Microsoft Academic Search
    Use cases
      Organize research papers
      Track citations
      Browse offline library
    Audience
      Researchers
      Academics
      Students

Code map

Detail Auto

An interactive map of this repo's files and how they connect — its source is parsed live in your browser. Click Visualize to build it.

filefunction / class

Why would anyone build with this?

REASON 1

Run 'python addpaper.py' with a title to search, download, and save a paper's metadata and PDF automatically.

REASON 2

Pull in a paper's citations and references to follow a research thread without manual searching.

REASON 3

Browse your accumulated paper collection in a local web page instead of scattered PDFs and bookmarks.

REASON 4

Extract keywords from saved papers as a starting point for topic modeling or similarity comparisons.

What's in the stack?

Python

How it stacks up

karpathy/researchleiadrienbrault/geekmagic-hacskevrojo/dulus
Stars274274276
LanguagePythonPythonPython
Last pushed2013-05-03——
MaintenanceDormant——
Setup difficultymoderatemoderateeasy
Complexity3/52/53/5
Audienceresearchervibe codervibe coder

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you spin it up?

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Requires Python 2.7 plus optional ImageMagick and pdftotext dependencies for some features.

No license information was mentioned in the explanation.

Yoink these prompts

Prompt 1
Show me the command to add a paper to my library using researchlei by searching for its title keywords.
Prompt 2
Walk me through setting up researchlei's Python 2.7 environment along with ImageMagick and pdftotext.
Prompt 3
Explain how researchlei decides which paper match is correct when my title search returns several results.
Prompt 4
Help me open and browse the local web interface that displays my saved paper library from researchlei's JSON files.

Frequently asked questions

wtf is researchlei?

A personal library manager for academic papers that fetches metadata, citations, and PDFs automatically and displays your growing collection in a local web page.

What language is researchlei written in?

Mainly Python. The stack also includes Python.

Is researchlei actively maintained?

Dormant — no commits in 2+ years (last push 2013-05-03).

What license does researchlei use?

No license information was mentioned in the explanation.

How hard is researchlei to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.

Who is researchlei for?

Mainly researcher.

View the repo → Decode another repo

This repo across BitVibe Labs

Don't trust strangers blindly. Verify against the repo.

Other repos in this lane