About ScholarList

Finding a paper is rarely the hard part of research. The hard part is keeping track of the people behind that work: remembering who wrote something you liked, noticing when they publish again, and not having to search their name from scratch every time you want to check in on their research. ScholarList exists to solve that specific problem.

How it started

The idea came from a simple frustration. ORCID gives every researcher a permanent, unique identifier, which is genuinely useful, but once you have found someone's ORCID profile, there is no way to keep them somewhere and come back later without searching for them all over again. At an ORCID workshop, our founder Mahesh asked Dr. Mohit Garg, an assistant librarian at IIT Delhi who was there for the event, why ORCID itself did not offer a way to save and follow researchers. Dr. Garg agreed it was a good idea, and pointed out that ORCID's own scope is deliberately limited to authentication and identity, not discovery or tracking. He suggested that if the idea was worth building, someone should just go build it.

That conversation became ScholarList. What started as "let me just save researchers to a list" has grown into a broader idea: giving people a personal, calm way to follow researchers and organize the papers that matter to them, without turning research into another feed to scroll through.

Why researchers, not just papers

Most tools built around scholarly communication start with the document. ScholarList starts with the person. Names alone are not reliable identifiers: researchers move between institutions, publish under different name variants, and can share a name with someone else entirely. ORCID exists to solve exactly that problem by giving every researcher a persistent, unique iD. ScholarList does not try to replace ORCID. It uses that identity layer as its foundation, and builds the following, organizing, and tracking experience on top of it that we always felt was missing.

What you can actually do here

Search for a researcher by name or ORCID iD and open a profile built from their public ORCID record, enriched with citation counts, h-index, and related metrics from OpenAlex where available. When you find someone whose work you want to keep up with, follow them, and they will sit in your WatchList instead of you having to search for them again next time. You can group researchers into your own custom WatchLists by field, project, lab, or however makes sense to you.

Saving papers works the same way. Save a publication directly from a researcher's profile, or add any paper from elsewhere just by pasting its DOI. Organize saved papers into custom, color-coded ReadingLists, and make any list public with a shareable link if you want to turn a personal collection into something useful for colleagues, a course, or a reading group.

Built on open scholarly infrastructure

ScholarList does not try to recreate the scholarly ecosystem from scratch. ORCID provides persistent researcher identities. OpenAlex provides an open catalogue of scholarly works and the connections between authors, institutions, topics, and funders. Crossref and DataCite provide the DOI and metadata infrastructure that much of scholarly publishing already runs on. ScholarList's job is to bring that information together into one focused, user-facing layer, not to be its original source.

Because of that, ScholarList is not the final authority on any researcher's record. The information shown here is synchronized from those external sources and can occasionally be incomplete, outdated, or inconsistent between databases, particularly for citation counts and other derived metrics, since different sources use different coverage and methodology. When accuracy genuinely matters, the original source is always the one to check.

A calmer way to do this

Academic work already comes with enough noise. ScholarList deliberately leaves some things out. There is no algorithmic feed deciding what you should pay attention to, no popularity score attached to any researcher, and no advertising competing for your attention while you are trying to find something. You decide who to follow, which papers are worth keeping, and how your lists are organized. Nothing here is designed to keep you scrolling longer than you need to.

How we handle your data

ScholarList was built with a deliberately small footprint for personal data. Signing in uses ORCID authentication rather than a separate ScholarList password, so we never see or store a password for you. Creating an account does not require an email address. We do not run advertising, and we do not use tracking analytics that follow you across other websites. The data we do keep is limited to what the product actually needs: your ORCID iD, your name, an optional display name, and the researchers and papers you choose to organize. The full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

Independence

ScholarList is an independently built project. It is not owned, operated, sponsored, or endorsed by ORCID, OpenAlex, Crossref, or DataCite. Each of those organizations provides important infrastructure that ScholarList relies on, but they are separate services with their own purposes, and ScholarList speaks only for itself.

Where this is going

ScholarList today is still an early version of what it is meant to become. We are exploring publication notifications so you know when someone you follow publishes again, richer activity timelines, topic tracking, and visual maps of co-author and collaboration networks so you can see how researchers connect to each other, not just to their own papers. We are also building out a Resources section aimed at the wider set of people who move research forward: students, librarians, publishers, editors, and research administrators, among others.

None of this is a promise of a specific feature by a specific date. ScholarList is being built incrementally, in the open, and the people who actually use it will have a real say in what gets built next.

Get in touch

ScholarList is free to use and built without advertising. If something does not work, or you have an idea for what would make it more useful, we want to hear about it through the contact form linked in the footer. The platform is still growing, and that is very much the point.