Show HN: Scholium, Your Own Research Assistant
7 comments
·March 4, 2025getnormality
Have you... have you heard of Google Scholar? It's not mentioned in your readme, and it's quite relevant to your interests.
SunnyWan15
I definitely should have mentioned it in my readme. I always found Google Scholar's search to be subpar. Part of the reason why is that the sources aren't always academic papers, it’s things like lecture slides. Let me know if my views are shared or if I'm alone on this one lol.
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rafram
- Home page layout is broken on narrow screens.
- Citations seem to just be the titles of the papers? Changing the citation style doesn’t do anything.
SunnyWan15
Thanks for the feedback! Are you viewing Scholium on a mobile device? If so, that was definitely an oversight by me and thank you for pointing it out!
Also, Thanks for letting me know the citations aren't working. I recently refactors how papers are stored in the DB, and haven't updated the citation generators yet. I'll get on that asap.
bugglebeetle
Anyone doing this work should be building on top of the OpenAlex API and its Unpaywall integration. This allows you to traverse the world’s largest research graph and access full text, where it’s available in any publicly available form.
SunnyWan15
Thanks for bringing OpenAlex to my attention! Part of my plans for Scholium was very similar to OpenAlex so knowing I don't have to build it myself is great. Are there any features you would like me to add with OpenAlex?
I built an AI-powered research agent designed to efficiently discover, summarize, and cite relevant academic papers based on user queries.
As a university student, I've written my share of essays and have also served as a copy editor for our student newspaper. During fact-checking, I noticed that Google often prioritizes unreliable and unscholarly resources—such as Medium articles, Reddit posts, and LinkedIn content—in its top results over scholarly ones. For instance, searching "Transformers" yields six blogs and articles before finally listing the Vaswani (2017) paper. This makes gathering credible sources and verifying facts tedious and time-consuming.
I realized that much of the repetitive work involved in fact-checking and source collection could be streamlined using a vector database paired with a retrieval model, inspiring me to create Scholium, an AI-driven research assistant that recommends and summarizes academic papers relevant to your queries. Currently, Scholium has access to all papers on arXiv, and my plan is to make Scholium into a search engine for research, kinda like a Google or Perplexity for papers. Please check out the repository, give it a star, and let me know your thoughts—I would greatly appreciate your feedback!
Web App: https://www.scholium.ai/
Repo: https://github.com/QDScholium/ScholiumAI