Privacy & your data, in plain English
Research Radar is a free service run to advance research. Everything below is a factual description of how the software works.
What we store
Your account lives in a single database on our server. It holds: your email address and name, your research-interest text (your description, topics, and exclusions), your seed papers, and — if you use them — your thumbs‑up/down votes and briefing click logs (which picks you opened), plus the briefings and fit scores we compute for you. That's it — there is nothing else to store, because 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 20 minutes; we keep only a hashed copy of each link's token, so a stored token can't be replayed. After you click a link, you stay signed in on that device via a signed browser cookie for 30 days (or until you sign out).
Zotero
The recommended way to connect Zotero is a public group library, which needs no API key at all. If you instead provide a private read-only API key, it is encrypted at rest and never displayed again — not to you, not in any page. You can disconnect at any time.
What leaves our 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 itself comes from public scholarly indexes (OpenAlex, arXiv, OSF preprint servers).
No tracking, no selling
We run no third-party analytics or trackers — every asset on this site is served from our own server, and the only logs are the click logs described above, used to make your briefings better. We never sell or share your data with anyone.
You will receive only the briefing emails at the frequency you chose, plus sign-in links you request — nothing else, ever. 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, anytime, in Settings → Delete account. Deletion removes your account, interest text, seed papers, votes, click logs, briefings, and any Zotero connection from our database immediately.
Questions? Email admin@papersradar.com.