Perplexity Scholar

Inspiration

We wanted to create a tool that makes academic research faster and more accessible for students and researchers who often struggle with sifting through countless journals and articles. Our goal was to build something that instantly delivers trustworthy, well-cited research summaries in a clean and user-friendly format.

What it does

Perplexity Scholar lets users ask complex academic questions and get detailed, citation-backed answers powered by the Sonar API. It compiles relevant articles, charts, and references into a neat one-page research brief that can be exported as a polished PDF, complete with a dark mode for comfortable reading.

How we built it

We built the app using Next.js to handle both frontend and backend in a unified framework. The backend integrates the Perplexity API (Sonar-powered) to fetch real-time research data, which the frontend organizes into an interactive, easy-to-navigate brief. We focused on a clean UI, dynamic dark theme, and PDF export functionality.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was optimizing API queries to get highly relevant and well-cited content without overwhelming the user with too much information. Another was designing the PDF export to maintain formatting and readability while including all necessary citations and charts dynamically.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully created a tool that delivers comprehensive research briefs in seconds with proper citations and charts, solving a real pain point for students and researchers. The dark mode and export-to-PDF feature make it both visually appealing and practical.

What we learned

We learned how to balance depth and clarity in AI-powered research responses and the importance of clean UI design in enhancing user trust. We also gained valuable experience integrating citation-rich APIs and dynamically generating complex PDFs from web content.

What's next for Perplexity Scholar

Next, we plan to add a feature to compare two viewpoints side-by-side to encourage critical analysis. We also want to support more languages and expand the citation sources to cover more diverse academic fields.

Built With

• netlify
• next.js
• perplexity
• tailwind