What Scholaris is, and what it will never do

What it does

Scholaris is a web app (and a version for your own computer) for people who read in order to write. You upload your sources: scanned books, papers, theses, notes, slides, recorded interviews, lectures, YouTube videos, web pages. Scholaris reads them once, carefully, and from then on you can:

• search your whole library at once, by exact words or by meaning, in any language, Old Spanish and Latin included;
• ask, and get a short answer with footnotes, each tied to its passage;
• cite in whatever style your journal wants, with the printed page of the edition in front of you or the exact minute of the recording;
• verify whether your library supports a sentence in your draft;
• explore what your library holds: people, works, places and concepts, and how the books cite each other.

The four rules

Point to the exact page

A citation that does not say where it is cannot be checked. So Scholaris stores an anchor for every passage: the printed folio you see on paper (not the number your PDF viewer shows), the second of a recording, the slide, the sheet and rows of a table, or the section and paragraph of a web page with its access date. How each anchor is worked out is in Formats and anchors.

Never invent a citation

No citation comes from a language model. A model may draft an answer, but it may only cite the passages it is given, and every note is checked against the text before you see it; the reference (author, year, page) is written from the stored anchor. If there is no passage, the answer says so. In the citation benchmark, over 41 claims, invented citations were zero (see Performance).

Show the provenance

Every piece of data shows where it came from: which source the record came from (the PDF itself, Crossref, OpenAlex, Open Library, Wikidata), how confidently a page number was read, whether it was printed or inferred, and who corrected it. What is not known is left empty instead of being filled in.

Leave the thinking to whoever writes

Scholaris does not write essays, does not summarise books so you can skip them and does not decide which quotation is the good one. It takes you to the place; what you do with what you find is yours.

What it does not do (yet, or ever)

• It does not search the internet for you: it works on what you give it. For discovering new literature there are better tools (see Alternatives).
• It does not write your text. The "cite" function gives you back your own text with the citations inserted, not a new text.
• It cannot guarantee a printed page number when the book does not print one: in that case it cites the physical position in brackets, "p. [12]", and says so.
• Offline is slower and somewhat less sharp: the home version can run with no cloud provider at all, on open models on your machine, but a scanned book takes minutes instead of seconds and search and citations lose some recall (see Self-hosting).

Who it is for

For the doctoral student with three hundred PDFs and a supervisor who wants the page number; for the lecturer preparing a class with twenty years of underlining; for the journalist going back to a two-year-old interview in search of one sentence; for translators, archivists and students, and for anyone who has ever said "I read it somewhere".