confer

where research convenes

A fast, searchable home for accepted papers from top conferences and journals — browse the field, follow authors and institutions, and turn papers into insight.

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What is confer?

Every conference and journal publishes its accepted papers on a different site, in a different format. confer gathers them into one place with a single, consistent interface — so you can scan a whole field in minutes instead of clicking through a dozen program pages.

It's a static website backed by a small scraping pipeline: each venue is normalized to one shared Paper shape, then enriched from official detail pages and bibliographic/open metadata sources for DOI, abstracts, publication details, and open-access links where available. No accounts, no backend — your groups, collections, tags and saved searches live in your browser. You can export everything to a file, share a collection with a link, or optionally sign in with GitHub to sync your config across devices automatically. Sync is opt-in; confer is fully usable without any account.

Highlights

• 🔎 Field-aware search. Type to search everything at once, or focus with prefixes like author:, title:, inst:, and track:. Exclude terms with -. Combine filters, saved searches, and per-paper tags for any workflow.
• 🏷 Authors & affiliations. Hover any author to see their institution; click to pull up all papers from that institution. Disambiguation handles same-name authors correctly across analytics and network views.
• 📊 Live insights. The right rail shows real-time charts of top institutions, authors, and tracks for whatever is in view — click any bar to drill in. Open the topic-trend chart to see how tracks rise and fall across venue editions.
• 🕸 Relationship networks. Explore co-author and institution collaboration networks for the current result set, rendered as an interactive graph.
• ⭐ Your library. Organise venues into custom groups, collect papers by name, tag anything, and save filter presets to return to later. Your whole library — collections, tags, status, notes — is visible at a glance in the settings panel.
• 📖 Reading status & notes. Mark papers to-read / reading / done and attach private notes. Filter to any status or to noted papers. Everything syncs across devices when signed in.
• 🔍 Find similar & "For you". Open any abstract to surface related papers from across the full corpus. The "For you" button in the toolbar recommends papers based on what you've saved, tagged, or noted — act on results inline or bulk-add them to a collection.
• 📤 Selection & export. Tick papers from the list, then copy BibTeX or download a CSV with DOI, authors, and publication metadata — ready for reference managers.
• 🔗 Share & sync. Share a collection or your full config with a link. Sign in with GitHub to sync automatically across devices via a private gist only you can reach. Browse the full version history of your config and roll back to any revision. No account needed; sync is opt-in.
• ⚡ Fast & private. One pre-rendered page — all filtering happens in the browser, with no tracking. Light/dark themes with accent colors, keyboard shortcuts (⌘K search, ⌘/ shortcuts), and a responsive layout for mobile.

Venues

confer currently brings together conferences and journals across EDA, computer architecture, software engineering, testing, programming languages, security and privacy, systems/networking, AI/ML, and natural language processing, with more added purely through configuration. Browse them all from the category sidebar. The current data set includes multiple yearly editions for several venue series, grouped by area, series, and year.

How it works

config/venues.yaml ─▶ scraper + enrichers ─▶ unified JSON per venue ─▶ Astro site ─▶ static host

• Config lists venues, their primary scraper, and the minimum source URL.
• Adapters each understand one source platform and emit the same Paper shape; when source records link to official detail pages, adapters can merge those too.
• Enrichers merge Crossref/OpenAlex metadata such as DOI, abstract, publication date, volume/issue/pages, keywords, author metadata, and open-access/PDF links.
• Site consumes only the unified data — adding a venue never touches the UI. It uses the enriched metadata for search, export, disambiguation, and network views.

See AGENTS.md for the architecture, the Paper schema, and the adapter contract.

Run it yourself

Build the data (Python, via uv):

cd scraper
uv run confer list                      # show configured venues
uv run confer build                     # build all enabled venues → web/public/data/
uv run confer build --venue <venue_id>  # build a single venue
uv run confer build --refresh           # ignore cache, refetch over the network

Each venue is cached under data/cache/<venue_id>/, so re-runs are offline unless you pass --refresh.

Run the site (Astro, Node ≥ 18):

cd web
npm install
npm run dev        # local dev server
npm run build      # static build → web/dist/

The site reads web/public/data/ at build time and outputs a static dist/ you can host anywhere. The committed JSON is the build input, so a deploy only runs the Astro build — no Python at deploy time.

Add a venue

1. Add an entry to config/venues.yaml (fields are documented inline).
2. Point its scraper: at a registered adapter.
3. Provide only the adapter's source locator, such as a source URL or source identifier. Tracks, event types, default labels, and Crossref/OpenAlex enrichment are inferred by the pipeline.
4. uv run confer build --venue <id> and check web/public/data/<id>.json.

To support a new platform, add an adapter under scraper/src/confer/scrapers/ and register it — see AGENTS.md, "How to add a scraper adapter".

Credits

Built by Super Lee & Claude.