Introduction: The PDF Bottleneck
Why PDFs are the critical bottleneck in academic research workflows
Introduction: The PDF Bottleneck
You've built the foundation. Claude Code orchestrates your research workflow, MCP connects your tools, and Playwright navigates academic databases. But there's a critical bottleneck we haven't addressed: PDFs.
Every academic paper you need is trapped in a PDF somewhere. Some are behind authentication walls. Others hide behind multi-step download forms. Many are scattered across different databases, each with its own interface quirks. And once you finally download them? You face extraction challenges, citation parsing nightmares, and the eternal question: "Where did I save that paper about neural networks?"
What This Episode Solves
This episode solves the PDF problem completely. You'll build systems that automatically discover papers across multiple databases, download them in parallel with intelligent naming, extract full text and citations, and organize everything into a searchable knowledge base—all without lifting a finger.