By Gaurab Chhetri - Research Project

ScholarNest - A Modern Platform for Publishing Research Papers Online

ScholarNest is an open-source platform for publishing and exploring research papers using MDX. Built with Next.js, Contentlayer, and shadcn/ui, it empowers individuals, labs, and research groups to share their work in a clean, organized, and discoverable way.

ScholarNest is a modern publishing platform for academic work. It was born from a simple question: why should sharing a research paper online feel clunky, outdated, or inaccessible?

I built ScholarNest to give individuals, labs, and research groups a way to publish their papers, datasets, and tools with beautiful typography, interactive MDX components, and clean organization, all in one open-source platform.

Features

• 📝 MDX-based authoring with full academic metadata (title, authors, DOI, BibTeX, datasets, tools, etc.)
• 📂 Folder-aware organization so research groups can structure projects as they like
• 🎓 Author & affiliation display with support for highlighting corresponding authors
• 📄 Academic sections including abstracts, acknowledgements, and citations
• 🧩 Custom MDX components like <MDXImage> and <MDXAccordion> for interactive figures and explanations
• 📦 Responsive design with prose-style typography for a journal-like reading experience
• ⚡ Next.js + Contentlayer + shadcn/ui foundation for performance and extensibility

Why It Matters

For most researchers, publishing online means static PDFs, fragmented websites, or institutional repositories that feel dated. ScholarNest changes that by making academic content as engaging and interactive as the modern web.

Whether you’re an individual scholar, a student group, or a research lab, ScholarNest makes it easy to:

• Showcase your papers with proper metadata and citations
• Embed figures, datasets, and interactive components directly in the text
• Maintain a professional yet accessible research hub

How It Works

1. Write your paper in MDX with metadata fields (title, authors, DOI, etc.)
2. Drop it into the src/papers/ directory
3. ScholarNest automatically renders it into a styled research page with sidebar navigation, responsive layout, and interactive figures

The result is a modern academic publishing workflow - version-controlled, open-source, and easy to deploy on Vercel or your own server.

Citation

If you use ScholarNest in your research or projects, please cite it:

@software{gaurab_chhetri_2025_17003358,
  author       = {Gaurab Chhetri},
  title        = {gauravfs-14/scholarnest: v1.0.0},
  month        = aug,
  year         = 2025,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {v1.0.0},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.17003358},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17003358},
}