rsrch 0.1.1

Manage your ever-growing list of research papers

rsrch

Manage your research papers through your CLI. This project lets you update a Notion database with arXiv links and download PDFs of papers to your local machine.

Installation

1. Create an internal integration in Notion.

2. Add the integration to the database you want to download from.

3. Create a .env file with the following variables:

   NOTION_TOKEN=secret_XXXXXXXX
   NOTION_DATABASE_ID=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
   

   Your NOTION_TOKEN can be found in your integrations page and is called the Internal Integration Token. The NOTION_DATABASE_ID can be found in the URL of your database (https://www.notion.so/{workspace_name}/{database_id}?v={view_id}).

4. Install local dependencies:

   python3 -m venv venv
   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

5. Important: Your Notion database must have the following columns with the corresponding types:

   • Title: Title
   • URL: URL
   • Date: Date
   • Authors: Text

   You can add more columns, but these are the ones that are required.

Usage

Activate the virtual environment:

source venv/bin/activate

Download

This will download all the papers from your Notion database to the papers/ directory.

cd src
python cli.py download

Push

You can push arXiv abstract links, PDF links, or IDs to your Notion database and have it autofill all of the relevant fields.

cd src
python cli.py push https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

Alternatively, you can add non-arXiv links manually to Notion.

Notes

• Uploading papers to Notion is currently only supported for arXiv links. Papers with titles that already exist in the database will not be uploaded.
• The script will download the PDFs to the papers/ directory. If you want to change this, you can change the path variable in main.py.
• I plan on adding support for other databases in the future, but for now it only works with Notion databases.

Bash Functions

For those of us that use the command line a lot, you can add the following functions to your .bashrc file to make it easier to use:

Download any new research papers

function get_papers() {
    # Go to rsrch directory
    cd ~/Documents/projects/rsrch

    # Download papers
    source venv/bin/activate
    python src/cli.py download
    cd papers
}

Push any new research papers

function add_papers() {
    # Go to rsrch directory
    cd ~/Documents/projects/rsrch

    # Push papers
    source venv/bin/activate
    python src/cli.py push $*
}

Now you can just run get_papers or add_papers with N arXiv links to download or push papers to your Notion database!

Resources

• Notion API