My tools didn't talk to each other
I'm Alberto. I work full time and do my research in whatever hours are left over, which meant the gap between reading something and actually understanding it kept getting wider. This is the story of why I built ScholarThread to close it.
Where this started
Research on borrowed time
I'm not a full-time student. I have a full-time job, and the research happens around it: early mornings, evenings, the odd free hour on a weekend. That constraint changes what a tool needs to do. Anything that wastes ten minutes re-finding a reference or re-reading a note I've already taken is ten minutes I don't have.
One task, four tools
Papers lived in Zotero. EPUB books lived on my Kobo. Proper, structured notes lived in Obsidian. Each tool did its one job well. A research project isn't one job though; it's all of them at once, and none of these tools knew the others existed.
The graph stopped at the vault's edge
Obsidian's graph view was the closest thing I had to seeing how my thinking fit together: which notes supported which argument, which ideas kept recurring. But it only sees Obsidian. It has no idea a note is really about page 214 of a PDF, a passage in an EPUB, or a diagram buried in a paper's appendix. The graph I actually needed, one where reading, notes and sources were all connected, didn't exist.
Screenshots were the symptom
My workaround was screenshots: grab the passage, grab the diagram, paste it into the note so the connection was at least visible somewhere. It worked, in that I could see it, but every screenshot duplicated something that already existed elsewhere, with no link back to its source, quietly going stale the moment that source changed.
I wanted it to just work
Not another app to maintain alongside the others. One place where importing a paper, reading it, taking a note, and linking that note to the exact passage, book or diagram it came from was all the same action. That's what I started building, first for myself.
Where AI helps, and where it has to stop
Academia is still working out what AI assistance is allowed and what counts as cheating, and the honest answer depends on who you ask, and keeps changing. I didn't want to build something that made that question harder to answer.
ScholarThread uses AI to help you find connections across your own library and surface passages you've already read; it organises and retrieves what's yours. It doesn't write your argument, summarise a paper you haven't read, or generate the thinking that's supposed to be yours. The goal is a tool your supervisor can look at and recognise as legitimate scholarly support, not a shortcut around the work.
What that means in practice
One place for your library
Zotero, OpenAlex, BibTeX, local uploads, EPUBs: your references and the files behind them belong together, not scattered across a folder, a browser and three apps.
Notes that link to the source, not just each other
A note in ScholarThread can point to the exact passage, page or diagram it came from, and to the other notes it relates to. That's the graph I was missing in Obsidian, now extended to include everything, not just the notes.
Your work stays yours
Read and annotate on your own device without an account, export your notes any time as an Obsidian-compatible Markdown vault, or sync them to a Git repository you control. Nothing here is a walled garden.
Built for research on borrowed time
No separate habit to maintain. Importing, reading, annotating and linking all happen in the same place, so the limited time you have goes into understanding, not re-finding what you already did.
Still built by someone using it every day
ScholarThread is built and operated by MOYD LTD, which today is me, Alberto Zuin. I'm not building this for a hypothetical market; I built it because I needed it, and I test it the only way that matters: by doing my own reading and writing in it, every week.
I'd genuinely like to hear from you: what's working, what's missing, and what would make your research life easier. Every message reaches me directly.
Get in touch
Questions, feedback or a bug to report? Send me a note and I'll get back to you, usually within a couple of business days.