Show HN: Kuhnelo – An almost all-in-one Research Toolkit

Hello HN! Wanted to show an ‘almost’ all-in-one researcher’s toolkit that me and my buddy built up on the side as I was completing my PhD. I call it ‘almost’ because this toolkit was not intended to replace everything a researcher does, but rather it brings together some of the more disparate pieces of software and tools used in research. It was previously released to colleagues and friends as ProjectGIRAF (it’s an inside joke), and we’d love to get HN thoughts on it. Logins/signups are only needed if you want to use the library and search history functions, and it’s using Google sign-on through Kinde, so you don’t have to worry about another account to remember.

What’s in Kuhnelo:

1. A graph-and-vector search engine – the base database is pretty much OpenAlex, with search being parsed semantically. Currently results can be presented in terms of citations or recency, but we are testing a ‘relevance’ ordering based on our graph centrality measures.

You can also click on the author labels to run a search of all the work from that author. We’re currently working on making the results order-able by different metrics for author searches in the same manner as regular searches, so that’s coming pretty soon.

To use this function, just search away and see your results! You can either do it like a Google Search with a bundle of keywords or as an actual question like you would to ChatGPT. You can also search specifically for the titles too, just click Title Search under the dropdown menu to change it from the default Content Search mode.

2. A citation manager/library – After searching, one can quickly save multiple papers into a library. You can create individual libraries for curating the literature for different projects/topics etc. If you have existing libraries in citation managers like Zotero, you can import the bib file to populate your current library. It’s also the reason why we have a log in function – so that our backend database can store all your records and retrieve them. This also allows for multiple device access.

Another feature we built in the library is a summarizer for all the items in each library, which you can find under the Library tab, essentially creating a quick summary of all the items you have in the collection.

Lastly, there’s also a citation generator for each library collection, allowing you to either copy and paste preset formats or just export it as a bibtex file.

3. A (Re)search History – Clicking on each entry in the history tab pulls up all the results shown when you first ran it, with (almost) all the same functionality as it did when you first searched. You can still add those works to your library etc. Similar to author searches, we’re working on making the results order-able by different metrics like regular search.

Our bigger goal is to consolidate all the different bits of software/tools in research into one toolkit that simplifies the research process. Thank you for reading my wall of text and I look forward to hearing everyone’s feedback and suggestions!

-BT