Usage guide

Using Paper Browser

Read a paper, click its citations, and keep the whole trail — then export it as a graph, an Obsidian vault, or a BibTeX file.

First time here? Add a free OpenAlex API key before you start — follow the two-minute setup guide. Citation lookups are slow and rate-limited without one.

Open a paper

Click the Paper Browser toolbar icon while viewing an arXiv page or any research PDF, and the paper opens in the annotated viewer. You can also use the viewer’s address bar directly: paste an arXiv id (like 1706.03762), a PDF or paper-page URL, or a Google Scholar / Semantic Scholar author URL, then press Load. Local files work too, via Upload PDF.

The Paper Browser viewer showing an annotated arXiv PDF on the left and the exploration graph panel on the right. — The viewer: the PDF with highlighted citations and author names on the left, the exploration graph on the right, and the status line reporting how many references and in-text citations were linked.

Click inline citations

In-text citation markers like [13] or (Smith, 2020) are highlighted. Hover one to preview the cited work — title, authors, year, venue, and abstract. Click it to resolve the cited paper and open its PDF in the same tab, so you never lose your place; use the back/forward arrows (or Alt+←/→) to move along the trail. If no open-access PDF is known, the preview offers Search web for PDF, and papers with no PDF at all open their publisher page in a new tab instead.

Hover preview over the citation marker [13] showing the Long Short-Term Memory paper's title, authors, year, venue, and abstract. — Hovering `[13]` previews the cited paper; clicking opens it in place.

Highlighted author names on the title page work the same way — click one to open that author’s profile and list of works.

Citation and author lists

The Citations and Authors buttons in the toolbar open dropdown panels for the current paper. The citations panel lists every parsed reference — Find highlights where it’s cited in the text, and PDF opens the cited paper. The authors panel lists the paper’s authors with how often each is mentioned; Open shows their profile and works.

The Citations panel listing parsed references with Find and PDF buttons for each entry. — The citations panel: every reference, with in-text usage counts.

The Authors panel listing the paper's authors with Open buttons. — The authors panel: click **Open** for an author’s profile.

The exploration graph

The graph panel records your session as you read. Papers you open directly become roots; papers opened by clicking a citation become children of the paper you were reading, with an arrow meaning “cited by the paper above”. Author pages join the graph the same way.

Revisit: click any node to bring that paper back up; hover for its details.
Rearrange: drag nodes anywhere, or use the sort menu (by year or citation count); Reset restores the automatic layout.
Edit: remove a node with its ×, click an edge to delete it, or use Manually connect nodes to add a citation edge yourself. Undo/Redo cover every edit.

The exploration graph panel with two paper nodes connected by a citation arrow, plus Export, Undo, Redo and sorting controls. — Each card shows title, year, and first author; the green bar marks a root.

Export your session

The graph’s Export menu saves the whole exploration:

HTML page — a self-contained interactive page of the graph. You can re-import it later with Resume session in the toolbar.
Obsidian vault (.zip) — one note per paper plus a canvas of the graph, ready to drop into Obsidian.
BibTeX (.bib) — a compiled bibliography of every paper in the graph, with whatever metadata the session collected (authors, year, venue, DOI, arXiv id, URL).
Publish to Semble — share the exploration as a Semble collection.

The graph panel's Export menu with options: HTML page, Obsidian vault (.zip), BibTeX (.bib), and Publish to Semble. — Exports live under the graph panel’s **Export** menu.

Reading controls

The floating controls in the top-left corner of the PDF handle the reading view: fullscreen, download, zoom, and toggles for the citation and author highlights if you’d rather see the PDF’s original links. When space is tight the controls collapse into a single button that expands on click. Zoom works four ways:

Pinch on the trackpad (or Ctrl + mouse wheel) over the PDF.
The − / + buttons.
Type a percentage into the % field and press Enter (25–300%).
Fit page — the rightmost button scales the current page so its top and bottom are both in view, centered in the window.

Zooming keeps your reading position in the document.

Floating PDF controls: fullscreen and download icons, zoom out, editable percentage field, zoom in, fit page, and highlight toggles. — PDF view controls: fullscreen, download, zoom, and highlight toggles.