ResearchCanvas

About

ResearchCanvas helps you **collect, organize, and connect** what you find on the web — articles, PDFs, and academic papers — as visual cards on a freeform canvas.

When you're researching across many tabs, it becomes hard to keep track of which source supports what, which contradicts which, and what you've already read. ResearchCanvas gives you a place to spread those sources out, draw lines between them, and watch your thinking take shape.

═══ Highlights ═══

▸ **One-click capture from any tab** — right-click a page or selected text and choose "Save to ResearchCanvas" to add it as a card to your toolbox. Or use the toolbar popup to save the current page directly.

▸ **Automatic paper recognition** — when a saved page contains a DOI, ResearchCanvas fetches the title, authors, journal, year, and citation count via Semantic Scholar (no API key required).

▸ **Drag cards onto a visual canvas** — arrange them spatially, group related ones, recolor by topic, leave notes per card.

▸ **Typed relations** — supports, contradicts, references, pending, plus any custom types you define. Each type has its own color, line style, and start/end arrow heads.

▸ **Multiple projects** — keep separate canvases for different research threads. The toolbox is shared across all projects.

▸ **PDF picture-in-picture** — open PDFs in a floating window so you can read while editing your canvas (Chrome 116+).

▸ **Local-first** — everything lives in your browser. Nothing is sent to any server, except a DOI lookup to Semantic Scholar when you save a page that contains one.

▸ **Keyboard friendly** — Esc to deselect, Cmd/Ctrl+A to select all, Shift+drag for additive box selection.

═══ Why this exists ═══

If your tab bar is a graveyard of half-read tabs and your notes don't link back to where you found them, ResearchCanvas is for you. It's built for people who think on canvases — students writing literature reviews, journalists tracing claims, knowledge workers turning scattered reading into something coherent.

═══ Privacy ═══

ResearchCanvas stores all data locally using chrome.storage.local. The only network request the extension makes is to api.semanticscholar.org when you save a page that contains a DOI, in order to look up that paper's metadata. No telemetry, no analytics, no account, no sync, no ads.