Citation Extraction Pipeline (Rust, Elaine CLI)

About the project

Extending a Rust CLI for reference management (Elaine)

Deterministic citation extraction from messy PDFs.

GitHub Repo: elaine-cli

The task

Improve an existing citation extraction pipeline. It works, but only on some PDFs.

Goal:

• improve parsing across formats
• handle messy layouts
• refine deterministic heuristics (no AI)

Inspired by citracer, but simpler and local-first.
Scoped task — not a full rewrite.

What you're working with

Prototype exists:

• PDF extraction (pdftotext)
• normalization
• reference parsing
• CLI (eln trace)

You’ll get a working branch and build on it.

Success

• Works on real PDFs
• Fewer parsing failures
• Clean, simple code

What you get

• Real parsing experience
• Work under constraints
• Open-source contribution

About Andrew Garcia ↗

Founder of WorkDog

I like problems that seem complicated until you find the simpler way through them — sometimes after making them unnecessarily complicated first.

Full-stack developer. I build things that work for the user, not just things that make me feel smart.

Working on WorkDog: a platform for taking on projects and building proof of work.

Still building

~🐧

Oh! This is Markdown-compatible! So are project postings 😯

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What you get