GapstractAI

GapstractAI is a research gap analysis platform built for students, professors and research teams who spend too much time manually digging through papers to figure out what hasn't been done yet.

You upload papers, and the platform reads them, pulls out citations, and helps you map where the actual gaps in a field are, instead of you doing that by hand across forty PDFs.

Live demo: https://gapstractaipihu.vercel.app

Why I built this

Literature review is the part of research nobody enjoys. You end up with a folder of PDFs, a messy spreadsheet, and no clean way to see what's actually missing in the field. GapstractAI is my attempt at fixing that: a workspace where papers, citations and gap analysis live in one place instead of across browser tabs and sticky notes.

What it does

• Upload and parse research papers (PDF and document processing)
• AI-assisted gap analysis using OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini, depending on what's configured
• Citation tracking so you can see how papers connect to each other
• Organizations and team workspaces, so a research group can share the same dataset
• Visual analytics for exploring gaps instead of reading raw text
• Google OAuth login with role-based access per organization
• Email notifications for invites and updates

How it's built

Frontend: React 18, Remix, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Ant Design, Recharts

Backend: Node.js, Express, tRPC (typesafe APIs end to end), Prisma, ZenStack for authorization on top of Prisma

Database & storage: PostgreSQL, AWS S3 for file storage, Redis for caching

AI: OpenAI, Anthropic Claude and Google Gemini as interchangeable providers

Other services: Passport.js and Google OAuth for auth, Socket.io for realtime updates, Mailjet/Nodemailer for email, Firecrawl for web scraping, DocRaptor for PDF generation

Running it locally

You'll need Node 20+, Docker Desktop, and pnpm.

git clone https://github.com/PihuJain/GapstractAI.git
cd GapstractAI
pnpm install
cp .env.example .env
# fill in your own values in .env
pnpm run init
pnpm run dev

Then open http://localhost:8099.

Project layout

app/
├── core/            core infra: auth, db, trpc, config, generated ZenStack code
├── designSystem/     shared UI components and layouts
├── plugins/          feature modules: ai, email, upload, socket, analytics, crawl...
└── routes/           pages and API routes
models/               Prisma/ZenStack schema
prisma/               migrations and seed data
server/               server entry point

Useful scripts

Command	What it does
pnpm run dev	start the dev server
pnpm run build	production build
pnpm run start	run the production build
pnpm run database:sync	sync schema to the database
pnpm run database:seed	seed sample data
pnpm run crud:sync	regenerate API types from the schema
pnpm run test	run tests

Local dev also spins up Postgres (port 5442), pgAdmin (5052) and Mailpit (8022) through Docker Compose.

Status

Actively being worked on. Core research gap analysis, auth and the organization/workspace model are working. Analytics and citation graphing are next.