DevScholar for JupyterLab

September 15, 2026 · View on GitHub

Your Notebooks, Connected to Knowledge.

DevScholar automatically detects research paper references (arXiv, DOI, IEEE, Semantic Scholar) in your Jupyter notebooks and provides rich metadata on hover, PDF preview, and citation management.

Hover a paper reference to see its metadata, then preview the PDF inside JupyterLab

Screenshots: hover metadata, PDF preview and Search & Cite

Hover over a paper reference to see its title, authors, year and abstract

Preview the PDF of a paper inside JupyterLab

If DevScholar saves you time, please ⭐ star the repository. It helps other researchers find it.

Features

1. Automatic Paper Detection

Detects paper references in both code comments and markdown cells:

arXiv: arxiv:1706.03762, https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12345
DOI: doi:10.1038/nature14539, https://doi.org/...
IEEE: ieee:726791, IEEE Xplore URLs
Semantic Scholar: Paper URLs and Corpus IDs
OpenAlex: openalex:W1234567890

2. Rich Hover Metadata

Hover over any paper reference to see:

Title & Authors
Abstract
Publication Year
Citation Count (DOI, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar references)
Direct links to PDF and paper page

Metadata comes from APIs that allow browser requests: DataCite for arXiv, OpenAlex for DOIs, and Semantic Scholar for Semantic Scholar IDs. IEEE document numbers are linked to IEEE Xplore without metadata, because no open API resolves them.

Citation counts for arXiv papers need a free Semantic Scholar API key. Paste it into Settings → Settings Editor → DevScholar → Semantic Scholar API Key. Without a key Semantic Scholar rate-limits anonymous browser requests too aggressively to be usable, so arXiv references show title, authors, year and abstract only.

3. Smart Highlighting

Paper references are underlined with color-coded indicators by source type, both in rendered markdown and inside the cell editor.

4. Search & Cite

Search for papers by name and insert citations directly into your notebook:

Use Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+P or Command Palette → "Search & Cite Paper"
Search by title, author, or keyword
Results from OpenAlex with citation counts
Inserts properly formatted citations

5. PDF Preview

Preview paper PDFs directly inside JupyterLab:

Click "Preview PDF" in the hover tooltip, or run "Preview Paper PDF"
Uses the browser's built-in PDF viewer (paging, zoom, search, text selection)
Works with arXiv and open access papers whose host allows browser downloads

6. Citation Management

Show All Paper References: A dialog listing every reference in the notebook with links
Export Bibliography: Copies BibTeX for all papers to the clipboard (shown in a dialog if the clipboard is unavailable)

7. Zotero Sync

Two-way sync between your notebooks and Zotero library:

Export papers from notebooks to Zotero: a preview lists every paper as new, already in your library, or similar title, and only ticked papers are written
Import citations from Zotero: pick items from a searchable list of your library and insert them into the active cell
Link workspaces to Zotero collections
Duplicate detection by DOI, arXiv ID and normalised title

8. Mendeley Sync

Two-way sync with Mendeley, with the same preview, picker and duplicate detection as Zotero:

Export papers to Mendeley
Import citations from Mendeley
Link workspaces to Mendeley folders

Mendeley has no browser login flow, so you paste an OAuth access token via Set Mendeley Access Token. Tokens expire after about an hour; run the command again when sync starts reporting authorization errors.

Installation

Prerequisites

JupyterLab >= 4.0

Install from PyPI

pip install devscholar-jupyter

Install from source (development)

git clone https://github.com/pallaprolus/devscholar-jupyter.git
cd devscholar-jupyter
pip install -e .
jupyter labextension develop . --overwrite

Usage

Open any Jupyter notebook
Add paper references in comments or markdown:

In code cells:

# Implements attention mechanism from arxiv:1706.03762
def attention(q, k, v):
    ...

In markdown cells:

This implementation is based on the Transformer architecture
described in [arxiv:1706.03762](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762).

Hover over references to see metadata
Use Command Palette → "DevScholar: Export Bibliography" to get BibTeX

Commands

All commands are in the Command Palette under the DevScholar categories.

Command	Description
Show All Paper References	Dialog listing every reference in the notebook with links
Search & Cite Paper	Search OpenAlex and insert a citation into the active cell (`Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+P`)
Export Bibliography (BibTeX)	Copy BibTeX for all papers to the clipboard
Preview Paper PDF	Open the PDF of the first paper that has one in a JupyterLab tab
Set Zotero API Key · Sync Papers to Zotero · Link Zotero Collection · Import Papers from Zotero	Zotero sync (sync shows a preview, import shows a picker)
Set Mendeley Access Token · Sync Papers to Mendeley · Link Mendeley Folder · Import Papers from Mendeley	Mendeley sync
DevScholar on GitHub · Report a DevScholar Issue	Project links, also in the Help menu

Settings

Configure via Settings → Settings Editor → DevScholar:

Setting	Default	Description
`highlightPapers`	`true`	Underline paper references in rendered markdown
`showTooltips`	`true`	Show metadata on hover
`parseCodeCells`	`true`	Detect papers in code-cell comments
`parseMarkdownCells`	`true`	Detect papers in markdown cells
`showPaperCount`	`true`	Show the paper-count badge on cells with references
`semanticScholarApiKey`	empty	Optional key that adds citation counts for arXiv papers

DevScholar for VS Code - The original VS Code extension

Feedback

Bugs and ideas: https://github.com/pallaprolus/devscholar-jupyter/issues (also reachable from Help → Report a DevScholar Issue inside JupyterLab).

License

MIT License - see LICENSE for details.

Part of the DevScholar ecosystem - Connecting code to knowledge.