Back to Compare
Updated 2026-04-24
Research
PDF
Citations

Knowledge base API for research teams

Turn your corpus of PDFs into a queryable API with page citations. Built for research groups that need speed, traceability, and sane pricing.

Research groups drown in PDFs: working papers, preprints, vendor datasheets, conference proceedings, old internal reports. Most of the knowledge is trapped in file systems that search tools cannot read. A knowledge base API turns that corpus into something any teammate — or any AI assistant — can query in one sentence.

What researchers care about

  • Retrieval that returns the specific page a claim comes from, so citations are exact.
  • Support for messy PDFs with scanned pages and complex layouts.
  • An API a small team can integrate without a dedicated platform engineer.
  • Predictable cost as the corpus grows from a few hundred to a few thousand documents.

How 3meel handles each

Every result carries a page pointer, so downstream citations are machine-verifiable. Ingestion extracts and pages the document on upload; you never have to babysit chunk sizes. REST and MCP endpoints both work out of the box. Pro ($17/month, 7-day trial) supports 10 knowledge bases and 100 files per KB; teams with larger corpora move to an enterprise plan with unlimited knowledge bases and priority indexing.

A workflow that tends to stick

  • Bulk-upload PDFs into a shared knowledge base.
  • Build a small internal assistant — or just use Claude Desktop or Cursor over MCP — pointed at that KB.
  • Write research notes that link back to retrieved pages via the citation URLs.
  • Periodically review the most-queried topics and expand coverage there first.

Privacy

Documents are encrypted in transit and at rest, and are never used for model training. If your group has data-residency or self-hosting requirements, enterprise deployments support running 3meel in your own infrastructure.

Point your research corpus at an API this week — free plan, no card.

Start free

Related guides

Knowledge base API for legal teams

Contracts, memos, and regulations queryable through a single API with strict audit trails and page-exact citations.

Knowledge base API for startups

Ship a grounded AI feature this week. 3meel is a knowledge base API designed for early-stage teams that cannot afford to build retrieval in-house.

Knowledge base API for enterprise

Self-hosted deployments, SSO, audit logs, and a knowledge base API that plugs into your existing AI stack.