Privacy and your data
Research Radar is a free, open-source academic tool. Everything below is a factual description of how the software works.
What is stored
Your account lives in a single database on the project's server. It holds: your email address and name, your research-interest text (description, topics, and exclusions), your seed papers, your settings (briefing frequency and size, scope option, priority journals), and, if you use them, your thumbs‑up/down votes, briefing click logs (which picks you opened), and any AI-coach drafts and audit reports generated from your own seeds and votes, plus the briefings and fit scores computed for you. Nothing else is stored. There are no payments and no profiles beyond your research interests.
Signing in
There are no passwords. Sign-in links are one-time and expire in 60 minutes. Only a hashed copy of each link's token is kept, so a stored token cannot be replayed. After you confirm a link, you stay signed in on that device via a signed browser cookie for 90 days, or until you sign out.
Zotero
The recommended way to connect Zotero is a public group library, which needs no API key. If you instead provide a private read-only API key, it is encrypted at rest and never displayed again, not to you and not on any page. You can disconnect at any time.
What leaves the server
To compute your briefing, paper titles and abstracts and your research-interest text are sent to third-party LLM APIs (Groq, Google Gemini, and OpenRouter/Cerebras). No other personal data is sent: not your email address, not your name, not your click history. Paper metadata comes from public scholarly indexes (OpenAlex, arXiv, OSF preprint servers).
No tracking, no selling
This site runs no third-party analytics or trackers. Every asset is served from the project's own server, and the only logs are the click logs described above. The project will never sell or share your data.
You receive only the briefing emails at the frequency you chose, plus sign-in links you request. Every briefing email has a working unsubscribe link, and you can switch to dashboard-only delivery in Settings.
Deleting everything
You can delete your account and all of your data yourself, at any time, in Settings → Delete account. Deletion removes your account, interest text, seed papers, votes, click logs, briefings, and any Zotero connection from the database immediately.
Everything on this page can be checked against the source code, which is open source under the GNU AGPL-3.0.
Questions? Email admin@papersradar.com.