Alexandria
by Paul Emsley
Personal library of scientific PDFs
Flathub reviewed
About
Alexandria is a GTK4 library for managing scientific papers. Point it at a directory of PDFs and it extracts metadata (title, authors, year, DOI, journal) from XMP, page text, CrossRef and OpenAlex, then presents a searchable, filterable card browser.
- Full-text search across title, authors, abstract, DOI and journal - Citation counts and per-year sparklines from OpenAlex - Built-in PDF viewer with highlight and comment annotations, and click-through citation links that jump to the reference and back again - A viewer sidebar with the paper's table of contents, page thumbnails and your highlights - Structured full text (JATS XML) fetched from Europe PMC and stored beside the PDF, giving exact reference lists - Authors window: a persistent trail of the authors you follow, with their works, collaborators and affiliation history - Journal and topic subscriptions, flagging new papers by authors you have looked up before - BibTeX, RIS and CSL export; BibTeX and DOI import - Preprint detection (arXiv, bioRxiv, chemRxiv and more) - Duplicate detection by DOI and file hash, with supporting information recognised as belonging to its parent paper - An MCP server, so an AI assistant you already use can search and read your library — no model or API key inside the app - Sidecar JSON metadata lives next to each PDF, never inside it
Permissions
1 permission weaken the sandbox. Flatsonar asks before installing.
- access to unrecognised path 'xdg-documents/Alexandria:create'
--filesystem=xdg-documents/Alexandria:create - inter-process communication (needed for X11)
--share=ipc - network
--share=network - X11 display, only when Wayland is unavailable
--socket=fallback-x11 - Wayland display
--socket=wayland - GPU acceleration
--device=dri
Who publishes this
On Flathub: the manifest was reviewed and built on Flathub's infrastructure, but the developer has not verified ownership of the app id.
- on Flathub: manifest reviewed and built by Flathub; the developer has not verified the app id
publisher:flathub
Maintenance
Recent activity on the upstream repository, or built and reviewed by Flathub.
No staleness signals: recent activity, or built and reviewed by Flathub.