About
For fifty years, research tools optimised for access. Finding the paper was hard; keeping it was the whole job. Every reference manager ever built — Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote — is, underneath, a place to put things.
Access is no longer scarce. Judgment is.
A generative model can now produce a hundred plausible citations before lunch. A predatory journal can produce a thousand plausible papers. The volume of things that look like scholarship has gone vertical, and the tools researchers use to manage their sources have not noticed.
We think the reference library is the highest-leverage place in the entire research workflow — because it is the one moment where a researcher makes a decision about a source. Not when they search. Not when they write. When they save. And right now, that decision is completely unassisted.
Noterva is what we built for that moment.
A scholarly record where nothing is cited that has not been checked.
We make the moment a researcher saves a source into the moment they evaluate it — by putting what we know about a paper, a journal, and a venue directly into their reference library.
The parent
Noterva comes from The Writing Project — the studio where we also run the research services practice and the participant community. The journal intelligence researchers use inside Google Scholar was built there. Noterva is where that intelligence follows the paper home.
About the name, since you'll ask: it's built on “note.” The rest we made up — we wanted a name we could actually own. The more interesting question is why we built it, which is that reference managers have the wrong job description.