PlotFinder

Search scientific papers by what you see, not what you remember. Find figures using natural language — "find the Phillips relation", "how does a planet radius change with distance from its host star?" — across the literature.

Prerequisites

• Conda (for the plot_finder Python 3.12 backend env)
• Node.js 18+ (frontend)
• Tesseract OCR (conda install -n plot_finder -c conda-forge tesseract, or brew install tesseract)

Setup

git clone <repo-url> astro-plot-finder
cd astro-plot-finder

cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env — add your ADS_API_KEY (required)
# Get a token at: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/user/settings/token
# ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is optional — see below

conda create -n plot_finder python=3.12
conda run -n plot_finder pip install -r backend/requirements.txt

cd frontend && npm install

Running

make backend    # http://localhost:8000
make frontend   # http://localhost:5173

API Key

ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is optional. Without it, the app still works fully, using a regex-based query parser and skipping the Claude reranking step. Add your own key in .env to enable Claude-powered query parsing and result reranking for more accurate matches.

Known Limitations

• Paywalled papers are skipped silently.
• Papers before ~1991 may have no arXiv version.
• Scanned-PDF OCR captions are noisier and flagged with a ⚠ badge.