ScholarForge
lead
engineer
Overview
ScholarForge is a privacy-first AI research companion that transforms research questions into structured briefs with source notes, paper outlines, citations, and organized project workspaces. Designed first for mobile use, it retrieves scholarly articles from OpenAlex with proper DOI links and APA/MLA citations. Users can create independent projects, manage research notes, build outlines, and export findings in Markdown—all with local data persistence and no external tracking.
Mission
What we're building
ScholarForge is a privacy-first AI research companion for college students, researchers, and busy professionals. It helps users turn a question into a structured research brief with ideas, source notes, paper outlines, citations, and an organized project workspace, designed first for iPhone and adaptable to computer use.
Current focus
The product now has a published research workflow with live scholarly retrieval from OpenAlex, DOI/source links, APA/MLA citation formatting and copy/export, and independent locally persisted projects with create/select/rename/delete controls. The app includes a server-side Azure OpenAI integration for generated briefs, but AI generation is not activated until valid deployment credentials are supplied. Until then, the app honestly provides an unavailable-state fallback while retrieval, citations, project management, notes, outline, and Markdown export remain usable without credentials.
Go-to-market readiness
The published surface is suitable for product review and early marketing of the workflow, but it should not be represented as a fully live AI service until Azure OpenAI credentials are configured and an end-to-end generation test passes. A future production hardening pass should also address rate limits, API terms/attribution, privacy disclosures, and a packaged native iOS distribution path if App Store delivery is required.