About PaperGrep

Connecting academic computer science with production code

PaperGrep helps developers discover the academic papers that power the software they use every day. We analyze major open-source projects to find references to research papers, algorithms, and techniques embedded in production code.

The Mission

Many massive OSS projects—compilers, databases, interpreters, operating systems—contain implementations of algorithms and techniques described in academic papers. Sometimes these are novel variations, sometimes they're optimized for production, and sometimes they're textbook implementations.

PaperGrep surfaces these connections. We make it easy to understand what papers influence real-world systems, and to learn from how they're actually implemented in practice.

How It Works

We scan source code repositories looking for paper citations—DOIs, arXiv URLs, and traditional academic citations in comments. When we find a paper reference, we extract metadata (title, authors, year, abstract) from academic APIs and link it to the exact location in the source code where it's referenced.

The result: you can browse papers by project, see which papers are most widely implemented, and dive deep into how specific techniques are used in production systems.

Who This Is For

• Systems engineers learning from battle-tested implementations
• Researchers seeing how their work is used in the wild
• Students connecting theory to practice
• Open source contributors understanding project architecture
• Anyone curious about the papers behind the code

Contact

Questions, feedback, or suggestions? Email us at [email protected]

Want us to analyze a specific repository? Let us know and we'll add it to our queue.