Student Research Assistant

Inspiration

As students we often have to write papers that necessitate many hours of research. This can involve deep dives into Google Scholar, generating citations, as well as collecting inspiration for topics and material to write about. My teammate and I thought that we could create a tool to aid in this process.

What it does

This Chrome extension has a few key features:

• De-cluttering webpages by blocking ads for accessibility and focus
• Generating a paper outline based on a user-provided topic
• Opening a Google Scholar search using the user's highlighted text
• Opening the Citation Machine website

How we built it

This project was built using HTML, JavaScript, and the ChatGPT API.

Challenges we ran into

Chrome extensions were not in our skill set prior to this project, and we ran into roadblocks involving browser permissions preventing code execution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Using the ChatGPT API to provide unique and meaningful functionality to students built into the browser was something we were excited to implement.

What we learned

Our team learned that Chrome extensions are a great way to package some functionality into a program and easily publish it without having to deal with build tools and the other hindrances that can come with creating and shipping a standalone web application.

What's next for Student Research Assistant

In the future, our team would like to invest more time into the UI design of the extension popup as well as add more functionality.

Built With

• chatgpt
• html
• javascript