paper CLI — Academic Paper Management

paper is a local-first CLI tool for managing academic papers with AI-powered semantic search. It stores data in SQLite databases and uses FAISS vector stores for similarity search.

Core Concepts

Scope: User vs Project

Every resource (config, knowledge base, literature) lives in one of two scopes:

• Project scope (default): stored in ./.paper-manager/ — tied to the current directory, good for project-specific paper collections
• User scope (--user flag): stored in ~/.paper-manager/ — shared across all projects, good for a personal paper library

Project-level config overrides user-level config. When looking up a knowledge base or literature, the tool checks project scope first, then falls back to user scope.

Data Hierarchy