About
The step nobody teaches
Finding the papers is the part that works. Carrel exists for what comes after: the weeks between a folder full of PDFs and a chapter you can defend.
Why it exists
Ask a second-year PhD student what the hardest part of a literature review is and almost nobody says finding the papers. Search works. The hard part arrives later, and it is oddly quiet: sixty PDFs read, a notes document that stopped being useful around page four, and a chapter file open and empty.
That gap gets skipped in methods courses because it is not a method, skipped by supervisors because they crossed it too long ago for it to look like a step, and skipped by software because it is far easier to build a better search box than to help somebody think.
What sits in the gap is not intelligence. It is a structure — which papers speak to which question, where they agree, where they contradict each other, what none of them has answered — and a great deal of fetching. Librarians teach it as a synthesis matrix, on a whiteboard, with sticky notes. Carrel keeps the matrix and does the fetching.
What we will and will not build
Evidence before fluency
A confident paragraph over a hole is worse than no paragraph. Carrel answers from the papers you imported or says it cannot — and every sentence it writes carries a link to the passage behind it, so checking takes a second rather than an afternoon.
The argument stays yours
We do the fetching, the grouping and the cross-referencing. We do not decide what your contribution is, which interpretation matters, or what you are willing to defend in a viva. A tool that pretended to would be selling you a review you cannot stand behind.
Your library is not our training data
Nothing you upload is used to train a model, by us or by anyone we work with. Your passages answer your questions and nobody else’s, they are stored in the European Union, and you can export or delete the lot whenever you like.
Finish the job, not the demo
The work does not end at a summary. It ends at a document a supervisor can mark up, so Carrel exports a real Word file whose tracked changes open as tracked changes — and LaTeX, Markdown and BibTeX for everyone else.
Who it is for
PhD and master’s researchers writing a literature review, a thesis chapter, a journal article, a conference paper or a proposal — and the supervisors and labs around them. It assumes you already know your field. It is not a tool for working out what to study.
Carrel runs in the browser. Your papers, the passages drawn from them and the files themselves are stored in Frankfurt, in the European Union, and isolation between workspaces is enforced in the database rather than only in the application. The privacy policy names every provider that touches any of it, and the FAQ answers most of what people ask before signing up.
Come and tell us what is missing
Most of what gets built next comes from researchers describing the thing that is still hard. The community server is where support happens and where that conversation is. Buying for a department or a library? Write to us.