Disclaimer
Is this project open source? Yes
Is this project completely free? Yes
Is this project vibe-coded beyond the author’s ability to comprehend how it works? No
Community Directory:https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/poneglyph
Hi everyone, sharing a plugin I’ve been building: Poneglyph.
The core idea — you write a research idea or thesis in IDEA.md, and a local deep research agent takes over. It pulls academic papers, synthesizes them, and generates a fully cited markdown note. The citations are real, sourced, and ranked by h-index in a central SOURCES.md ledger. I’ve been using it myself for academia and honestly it’s changed how I map out a research space before diving into primary sources.
The reason I’m most excited about it is how digestible the output is — it’s not just dumping links at you, it’s actually building a cited, structured note you can work with.
I have kept in mind to maintain AI as a tool alone. The goal is never to let AI “take control” or turn into a slop machine. Poneglyph is meant to be a strong accelerant for academic work — you still drive the research, decide what’s worth pursuing, and are always the one who decides what’s actually trustworthy. Which is why there’s a verified lifecycle status that only a human can set. The agent moves nodes from draft → researched on its own, but nothing gets marked verified without you reviewing it.
Semantic backlinking is there too — new nodes get compared against your existing vault via ChromaDB and bidirectional links get inserted where there’s meaningful overlap — but that’s more of a bonus on top.
Poneglyph uses Ollama for embeddings and ChromaDB as the local vector store. This was a deliberate choice to keep things maintainable and local-first. If you don’t want to touch cloud AI providers at all, you can run everything — embeddings and the LLM — fully through Ollama. No data leaves your machine. For those who prefer cloud providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral), those work too. Support for other providers will be added in upcoming releases.
Zotero integration for citation management and LaTeX export of the research graph as a structured literature review are both coming. If either of those is something you’d use, let me know — helps me prioritize.
Setup needs Ollama + ChromaDB running locally (one-command setup scripts included for Windows and macOS/Linux).
GitHub: https://github.com/kausthub-kannan/poneglyph
The plugin will be in constant development, will be really helpful if any issues or bugs are reported. All open to feature requests. Looking forward for the replies in the thread!