Overview

Source Taster helps students and researchers verify bibliographic references quickly. The system packs three main building blocks:

• Browser extension (apps/extension) – a Vue 3 application with Vuetify that imports references (text, PDF, context menu), performs AI-assisted extraction, and visualises verified matches.
• API (apps/api) – a Hono server on Node.js 20 that orchestrates AI extraction, AnyStyle parsing, database searches (OpenAlex, Crossref, Semantic Scholar, Europe PMC, arXiv), and deterministic matching.
• Shared types (packages/types) – Zod schemas and TypeScript definitions for CSL-JSON, API contracts, matching configuration, and UI defaults. Both the extension and API consume them.

A VitePress site (apps/docs) provides the documentation you are reading right now; the Markdown content lives in apps/docs/en and apps/docs/de.

Goals & Benefits

• Reliability – Every incoming payload is validated via Zod (for example ApiExtractRequestSchema, ApiMatchRequestSchema). Errors are converted to consistent JSON responses by registerOnError in Hono.
• Traceability – Matching results include per-field scores that surface in the UI, see Matching & Scoring.
• Extensibility – AI providers are abstracted (ApiAIProviderSchema, AIProviderFactory), and you can add more search providers behind dedicated service classes.
• Privacy – User API keys are encrypted with AES-256-GCM and stored in a key-file storage (apps/api/src/secrets/keystore.ts).

Extension Highlights

• Import via context menu (“Check bibliography”), PDF upload, or manual text paste.
• AI extraction with configurable CSL fields taken from shared defaults.
• AnyStyle-powered token labelling and manual correction before converting to CSL.
• Database search with user-defined priorities and optional early termination for high scores.
• Field-level match visualisation with colour-coded scores directly inside the UI.

API Highlights

• /api/extract – AI extraction with response_format=json_schema and automatic fallback to json_object.
• /api/search/:database – provider-specific search with DOI/identifier shortcuts and query heuristics.
• /api/match – deterministic matching with normalisation and similarity heuristics.
• /api/anystyle/* – proxy to a Ruby AnyStyle server for tokenisation and CSL conversion.
• /api/user/ai-secrets – store, inspect, and delete user keys (scoped by X-Client-Id).

A full flow from extraction to matching is illustrated in Architecture.