Alexandria

Overview

Alexandria is a reference manager, available on Linux.

Features described in its Flathub listing: full-text search.

Overview written by LicitPro from the documentation published by the authors and the cited sources; we have not tried the resource ourselves.

At a glance

Alexandria is completely free: it is open source software, and every feature is available without paying or subscribing.

Its licence (GPL-3.0+) is a copyleft open source licence: you may use, study, modify and redistribute it, including commercially; modified versions must keep the same licence.

About

Alexandria is a application for managing a local store of scientific papers. Typically starting with a directory of PDFs, it extracts metadata (title, authors, year, DOI, journal) from the text of the PDF, consults CrossRef and OpenAlex, then presents a searchable, filterable card browser. Alexandria tries to make it easy to find and add related papers. Full-text search across title, authors, abstract, DOI and journal Citation counts and per-year sparklines from OpenAlex Built-in PDF viewer with highlight and comment annotations, and click-through citation links that jump to the reference A viewer sidebar with the paper's table of contents, page thumbnails and your highlights Structured full text (JATS XML) fetched from Europe PMC and stored beside the PDF Authors window: a persistent trail of the authors you follow, with their works, collaborators, funding and affiliation history Journal and topic subscriptions, flagging new papers by authors you have looked up before BibTeX, RIS and CSL export; BibTeX and DOI import Preprint detection (arXiv, bioRxiv, chemRxiv and more) Duplicate detection by DOI and file hash, with supporting information recognised as belonging to its parent paper An MCP server, so an AI assistant you already use can search and read your library — no model or API key inside the app Sidecar JSON metadata lives next to each PDF - so it's easily transportable

Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)