What is Apex Scholar?
Apex Scholar is an all-in-one workspace for academic researchers. Think of it as a single app that replaces:
- Zotero/Mendeley (reference management)
- Google Scholar alerts (paper discovery)
- Evernote/Notion (notes and insights)
- Trello/Asana (task tracking)
- Overleaf (LaTeX writing)
- spreadsheets (grant budgets)
And it adds AI to help you understand papers faster.
Who is this for?
- Graduate students doing literature reviews
- Postdocs managing multiple projects and grants
- Professors supervising teams and writing papers
- Independent researchers who want a streamlined workflow
If you read papers, write manuscripts, and track deadlines—this is built for you.
Core Concepts
Projects
Everything in Apex Scholar belongs to a project. A project might be:
- "PhD Thesis – Climate Modeling"
- "NIH Grant Application 2026"
- "Systematic Review on NLP in Healthcare"
You can switch between projects to keep your work separate.
Resources
These are the papers and articles you save. Each resource includes title, authors, abstract, and a link to the original. You can tag them and generate citations.
Insights
When you ask Apex Scholar to analyze a paper, it extracts structured information: problem, method, results, limitations. This makes comparing papers much faster.
Knowledge Graph
A visual map of concepts in your research area. It helps you see clusters and gaps—where there’s opportunity to contribute something new.
Composr
The LaTeX editor. Write your manuscript with syntax highlighting and compile to PDF with one click.
How do I get started?
- Go to https://apex-scholar.vercel.app
- Click Sign in with Puter (free cloud storage)
- Create your first project (e.g., "My Research")
- Use the Explore tab to search for papers
- Click the bookmark icon to save papers
- Visit Insights to see AI-generated summaries
That’s enough to be productive.
Do I need to pay?
No. Apex Scholar is open-source and free to use. You only need free API keys for some search engines (SerpAPI, NCBI) if you want to search Google Scholar and PubMed. The demo instance may have rate limits; self-hosting gives you full control.
Is my research private?
When you enable End-to-End Encryption (Settings → Encryption), your data is encrypted in your browser before being stored. Not even the storage provider can read it. We recommend enabling this.
Next Steps
Or jump straight to Features for a tour.