Papers We Love is a community-driven repository that curates academic computer science papers for reading and discussion. The repository serves as a centralized directory linking to papers scattered across the web, organized by topic and research area. While licensing restrictions prevent the project from hosting many papers directly, the repository provides links to their locations, with a scroll emoji indicating papers that are available locally. The project extends beyond the GitHub repository itself, maintaining an associated website at paperswelove.org and organizing local chapter meetups in various cities where community members gather to discuss papers in depth.
The repository is classified across multiple computer science domains including algorithm theory, distributed systems, data structures, machine learning, programming languages, systems design, and software engineering. This broad scope reflects the community's intent to cover significant research across the entire computer science field. The project actively encourages contributions through pull requests for adding new papers, improving organization of existing content, and linking to other paper repositories that align with the project's mission.
The Papers We Love community maintains several complementary resources beyond the core repository. The project hosts a YouTube channel featuring past presentations and video playlists from chapter meetups, providing accessible introductions to papers discussed by the community. A Discord server enables ongoing discussion about PWL events, repository content, and related topics. The README includes an extensive curated list of other sources for finding papers, ranging from arXiv and Google Scholar to institutional repositories from Microsoft Research, Facebook, and MIT, as well as specialized collections like the Bell System Technical Journal archives and functional programming bibliographies.
Recognizing that academic paper reading requires different skills than typical technical reading, the repository provides educational resources on how to approach papers effectively. These include guides on reading academic articles, understanding scientific papers, and advice on whether and when to engage with research literature. The project also offers a practical tool for community members: a script that scrapes markdown files for PDF links and downloads papers to their respective directories, with additional options documented in a separate README.
GitGenius activity data reveals that the repository maintains moderate engagement with a median issue and pull request response latency of 347.7 hours, though some items experience significantly longer resolution times with a mean latency of 3617.0 hours. The most active contributors tracked include DarrenN with 27 events, deltamualpha with 11 events, and Abm32 with 3 events. The most common issue labels are report and automated issue, each appearing 18 times. The repository shares contributors with several other projects including github/gh-aw, solo-io/gloo, and longhorn/longhorn, suggesting overlap in the developer communities interested in both papers and these related projects.
The project emphasizes community standards through a Code of Conduct that applies to all meetups and interactions. Contributing guidelines are documented in a CONTRIBUTING.md file that addresses content licensing concerns, ensuring the repository respects intellectual property rights while maximizing access to important research. The Papers We Love name and logos remain copyrighted by Papers We Love Ltd, with specific guidelines provided for communities starting new chapters in their cities.
