Alice

An average paper on arXiv cites 30-50 other papers, that is 30-50 many concepts a reader may need to read through. Those new to research and those who read papers as a hobby face this barrier of entry, which could be demotivating and time-consuming. Currently, solutions include opening multiple tabs on your browser to have more context, but that is time-intensive and not optimal for your computing resources. With the advent of LLMs and AI tools, a lot of people use them to summarize key findings of a paper but that too requires one to navigate away from their paper and just makes the whole process inconvenient. By integrating multiple APIs and aggregating data from multiple sources, Alice is your go-to tool for literature review and academic software development.

Alice works by using pdf.js, which is a platform for rendering and interacting with PDFs on the web browser developed by Mozilla. Every time the user hovers on a citation linked in the PDF, Alice detects it and opens a popup with information about the cited paper so you don't have to navigate back-and-forth to the References section, copy the title, open arXiv again, for several hundred times. Alice uses the embedded link to get the title, year, and authors of the cited paper and uses the arXiv API to fetch relevant details to display (as seen in the image).