JARVIS RD Assistant — User Manual¶
JARVIS RD Assistant is a self-hosted AI research assistant designed for individuals and small teams who want to own their research workflow without relying on external SaaS platforms.
What it does¶
- Ingest papers from arXiv, Semantic Scholar, Zotero, and other configured sources into your private library.
- Hybrid RAG chat — ask questions across your entire library using a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline that combines BM25 keyword search, vector semantic search, and cross-encoder reranking.
- Citation and knowledge graphs — explore how papers cite each other and how concepts connect across your corpus.
- Contradiction detection — surface papers that make conflicting claims about the same topic.
- Pulse recommendations — a daily deck of paper recommendations generated from your active research topics on a configurable schedule.
- FSRS spaced-repetition cards — review key facts extracted from papers on a scientifically-spaced schedule.
- Notes and projects — annotate papers and organise related work into named projects.
- Telegram integration — receive Pulse digests and interact with your library from a Telegram bot.
- Multi-user — the system supports multiple accounts with role-based access (regular users and admins).
Who this manual is for¶
This manual is for end users — researchers and readers who use the web application. It covers every page in the UI, the sign-in flow, and the day-to-day research workflows.
Operators (people who install and maintain the system) should also read:
DEPLOYMENT.md— installation, Docker Compose configuration, environment variables, and TLS setup.SECURITY.md— hardening checklist, secret management, and known residual risks.
These documents are part of the repository and are available in the Get Started and Operate sections of this site.
Manual organisation¶
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Getting Started | First-run operator bootstrap, signing in, post-login setup wizard, and the onboarding tour |
| Navigation | AppShell layout, sidebar nav groups, TopBar controls (⌘K, Jobs, Pomodoro, theme) |
| Home & My Day | Home dashboard, My Day page |
| Research Feed & Library | Inbox, Library, Discover (search), and Trash views of the feed |
| Paper Detail | Three-pane paper view: metadata, full text, RAG chat |
| Ask (Cross-paper RAG) | Ask questions that span your entire library |
| Pulse Deck | Daily recommendation deck, card rating, and schedule configuration |
| Projects | Organising papers into named projects |
| Knowledge Graph | Interactive concept-level knowledge graph |
| Citation Graph | Paper-level citation network explorer |
| Extraction Table | Structured data extracted from papers |
| Learning Cards | FSRS spaced-repetition review and card library |
| Analytics | Reading activity charts and corpus statistics |
| Settings | Sources, topics, automation, integrations, and account |
| Telegram | Pairing your Telegram account and (admin) bot-token configuration |
| Admin Pages | User management, system health, audit log, backups, system logs (admin role only) |
How this manual is maintained¶
Each page in this manual begins with an HTML comment of the form:
This records which routes the page was last verified against and when. When the UI changes, the per-page date is bumped and any inaccurate content is corrected. If a date is more than a few months old, treat the page as a starting point and check the live UI for details.
Where a screenshot would be helpful, pages contain placeholder comments of the form:
These placeholders make it cheap to add real screenshots later without leaving broken image references in the meantime.