A reference manager for research papers

Your papers, in storage you own.

Lightkone keeps your papers, PDFs, highlights and notes as plain files in your own bucket or GitHub repository. Read and highlight on any device, search inside every PDF, keep your citation keys stable for LaTeX, and ask Claude about your library with your own key.

A KausalFlow project. KausalFlow builds open tools that make the life of scientists easier.

Open Lightkone Moving from Paperpile

Bookmark app/ to go straight to your library next time.

The library: a list of papers with the selected paper's details and abstract beside it. — The library, with a paper's details and its citation key.

The library in the dark theme. — The library, with a paper's details and its citation key.

The PDF reader on a phone, showing the first page of Attention Is All You Need. — The reader on a phone.

The PDF reader on a phone, in the dark theme. — The reader on a phone.

What it does

Everything a reference manager should, and a few things for people who read the equations.

Add papers the quick way

Paste DOIs, arXiv ids, links or BibTeX, import a whole .bib, or share a page to Lightkone from your phone. Free PDFs are fetched for you.

Read and highlight

A PDF reader that works on a phone, with highlights, notes and dark pages. Select an equation and Claude explains it in the context of the paper.

Find anything

Search titles, authors, notes and the full text of every PDF, with filters like author:wilson year:1971-1975. Or search by equation, in LaTeX.

Write with it

Citation keys never change once given. Keep a folder's .bib in GitHub for Overleaf, or a manuscript's .bib holding exactly what it cites.

Discover what's near

Each day's arXiv preprints ranked by how close they are to your library, and a citation map of what your papers cite that you don't have yet.

Ask your library

Questions answered from your own papers, citing the pages. Claude, Claude Code and other AI apps can also use your library through MCP.

Where your library lives

There is no Lightkone account and no Lightkone database. You pick the storage; the app reads and writes it from your browser.

Cloudflare R2Free up to 10 GB. The usual choice. AWS S3 or MinIOAny S3-compatible bucket you already run. A private GitHub repositoryEvery save is a commit, so every change is kept. This browserNo setup, for trying it out.

lightkone/library.json        your papers, folders, tags and notes
lightkone/library.bib         the whole library as BibTeX, for LaTeX
lightkone/annotations/        your highlights, one file per paper
papers/All Papers/HINTON/     the PDFs, filed the way Paperpile files them

Coming from Paperpile

Your folders, labels, citation keys and PDFs come over. PDFs keep Paperpile's own layout, so one copy of your Google Drive folder links every paper to its file.

Read the step-by-step guide

Your data stays yours

No accounts, no tracking. The site serves the app and nothing else sees your library.
Keys stay in your browser. Each is sent only to the service it belongs to.
Open formats. JSON, BibTeX and PDF: back them up, read them with other tools, or leave.

What is processed where

Open your library.

Open Lightkone