Synap for researchers
Capture papers. Build knowledge graphs.
Research is drowning in PDFs, bookmarks, and half-remembered citations. Synap captures everything, extracts the metadata, and your knowledge graph grows itself.
From reading to a literature map
- Capture everything
Save papers from arXiv, links, seminar notes, and PDFs from your downloads folder. Drop them into the Browser or hand them to your connected agent. Each becomes the right record type — article, bookmark, note, or file.
- Metadata, extracted
Drop in a paper and its title, authors, abstract, publication date, and key topics are extracted. Author records are created, existing topics linked, methodologies tagged. No manual entry, no BibTeX wrangling — you approve the proposal.
- A graph that grows
Over time your pod becomes a rich graph of papers, authors, topics, methodologies, and your own notes. Explore it as a graph, or switch to a table to filter by topic or date. Find the paper that connects two fields you study.
- Questions with precise answers
Ask your agent: “What papers in my library discuss attention mechanisms in genomics?” Because the data is structured, not just text, the answer follows relationships instead of fuzzy keyword matches.
Why a pod for research
Data sovereignty matters in academia.
Your research data lives on a dedicated pod you control. No terms of service granting rights to your data. Self-host for sensitive research, or let us run the pod for you.Any model.
Use the model that fits the task, or run a local one for proprietary data. Claude, ChatGPT, Le Chat, Cursor, Claude Code and other MCP clients connect to your pod.Standard formats.
Your pod is PostgreSQL. Export the whole graph as JSON or CSV, or connect your analysis tools. No proprietary format traps.
Common questions
How do researchers use Synap?
Researchers capture papers (as article records), links, and notes through the Browser or a connected agent. Title, authors, abstract, and topics are extracted, and the paper is linked to related papers, authors (as person records), and research topics in your graph. The result is a live, queryable literature map.
Can Synap replace Zotero or Mendeley for reference management?
Synap complements or replaces basic reference management. Zotero focuses on citation formatting and PDF annotation; Synap builds a semantic knowledge graph: who wrote what, which papers share topics, which ideas connect across your reading. Synap doesn't generate formatted citations, but it is better for synthesis and discovery.
Does Synap work for qualitative research and field notes?
Yes. Synap handles any content: interview transcripts (note records), observation logs, field photos (file records), and research memos. These are linked to participants (person records), sites, and themes, building a structured qualitative dataset on your own server.