Find the lab that completes your work, not a mirror of it.
ScholarPair reads your research idea and returns a ranked shortlist of principal investigators, each with the reason they fit, the gap they fill, and the evidence. Free for academics, forever.
What it is for
The best collaborations are often the ones you did not know to look for: the methods lab in another department, the group on another continent already solving your bottleneck. But finding them is slow and network-bound. You ask around, you search by keyword, and you miss the person who is exactly the missing piece. ScholarPair runs that search for you across thousands of profiled labs at once, and explains every name it returns.
"I have single-cell RNA-seq of tumor-infiltrating immune cells and need a computational partner for trajectory inference and RNA velocity."
You getRead as a complementary request, with a ranked shortlist. The top match, for example:
Prof. Lena Ortmann
StrongWhy. Builds trajectory-inference and RNA-velocity methods (scVelo, CellRank) and applies them to immune single-cell data, exactly the analysis you need.
Gap. No wet-lab tumor immunology, so your data and their methods complement each other.
Publications: "Dynamical models of single-cell differentiation" (2023), and 5 more.
A topically similar cancer biologist, who would only mirror your own work, is honestly ranked lower.
How it works
Describe
Paste a project, a specific aim, or a paragraph of your proposal.
Direct or complementary
It reads the intent and decides whether you need a direct expert or a complementary partner who fills a gap.
Pre-filter by meaning
An embedding search narrows thousands of labs to the most relevant by meaning, not keywords.
Two-stage ranking
A fast screen shortlists candidates, then a second pass ranks each one against what you actually asked for.
Explained shortlist
You get why each lab fits, the gap it fills, and real publications as evidence, or an honest no strong match.
Why not just use ChatGPT?
Ask a general chatbot for collaborators and it will confidently produce names, affiliations, and papers, some real and some invented, with no way for you to tell which. It has no live database of researchers, no way to rank thousands of them against your specific need, and no evidence behind its answer.
That last point matters most. ScholarPair is built to tell you the gap, and to say when there is no match, instead of fluent fiction. And because it searches the database directly, it can scan the whole field, not just what a model happens to remember.
Questions
Is it really free?
Yes. ScholarPair is in beta and currently free for everyone. It will always be free for academic and non-commercial research. Plans for commercial, industry, and technology-transfer use will come later.
How do I find a complementary partner if I cannot quite define it?
You do not have to define it. Just say what you do and what you are missing, in plain words. A complementary match is a partner who fills a gap, for example a computational lab for your experimental data, while a direct match is an expert in your own area. ScholarPair reads your free-text request and auto-detects which one you need, so you never have to choose. Naming the gap you want filled is exactly what it is best at.
Which research fields are covered?
The database spans the physical, health, life, and social sciences. Coverage is deepest in medicine, molecular biology and genetics, physics, engineering, and neuroscience, with a broad tail across materials science, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, environmental and earth sciences, immunology, and economics. More fields and depth are being added.
How many labs are in it?
12,978 profiled labs today, and growing across fields and countries.
Where does the data come from?
Researcher profiles are built from public research data (via OpenAlex). We link to public profiles and never publish scraped personal email addresses.
Does it make things up?
No. Every match is a real principal investigator grounded in their real publications, and it returns an honest no strong match rather than inventing one.
How should I write my query for the best results?
Write a few sentences, not a keyword. Describe what you have, what you need, and the gap you are trying to fill. The more you say about your method and your missing piece, the sharper the match.
Do the PIs know they are listed, and will you contact them for me?
Profiles are built from public research data and link to public profiles. We do not contact anyone on your behalf. Reaching out is up to you.
Are more features planned?
Yes. We plan to add more researchers from more fields and geographies, and features like outreach-letter drafting, contact details, advanced search, and saving your previous results. Stay tuned. Have an idea? Email info@scholarpair.online or send us a suggestion.
Can I add or correct my lab?
Yes, email info@scholarpair.online and we will help.
Is my search private?
We use your query only to produce your matches, and we do not sell it. To generate the ranking it is processed by Google's Gemini API. See our Privacy Policy for details.
Free for academics. No account needed to start.