CoRATES

Collaborative Research Appraisal Tool for Evidence Synthesis

CoRATES is a web application designed to streamline the entire quality and risk-of-bias appraisal process with intuitive workflows, real-time collaboration, and automation, creating greater transparency and efficiency at every step. Built for researchers conducting evidence synthesis, it enables real-time collaboration, offline support, and PDF annotation.

Getting Started

See the detailed Contributing Guide for step-by-step setup instructions.

See detailed Documentation for more info.

See the Code of Conduct.

See Security.

Tech Stack

Frontend

• Framework: React 19 with TanStack Start and TanStack Router
• Build: Vite with TanStack Start
• Styling: Tailwind CSS v4 with @tailwindcss/vite
• UI Components: shadcn/ui (Radix-based) + lucide-react
• Data Fetching: TanStack Query (server state management)
• Client State: Zustand
• Tables: TanStack Solid Table
• Charts: D3 for most user charts and Chart.js + solid-chartjs for admin
• PDF Viewer: EmbedPDF with plugin ecosystem
• Local Storage: Dexie (IndexedDB wrapper) with y-dexie for Yjs persistence
• Forms & Validation: Zod (schema validation)
• Testing: Vitest + @solidjs/testing-library + jsdom

Backend

• Runtime: Cloudflare Workers (serverless edge compute)
• Real-time: Durable Objects (stateful computing for WebSocket connections)
• Framework: Hono (lightweight web framework for Workers) with OpenAPI
• Database: Cloudflare D1 (serverless SQLite)
• ORM: Drizzle ORM with automatic migration generation (drizzle-kit)
• Storage: Cloudflare R2 (S3-compatible object storage for PDFs)
• Auth: Better Auth with org, admin, and Stripe integration for payments
• Email: Postmark for transactional emails
• Validation: Zod
• Testing: Vitest with @cloudflare/vitest-pool-workers

Monorepo & Tooling

• Package Manager: pnpm with workspaces
• Build Orchestration: Turbo
• Linting: ESLint with custom CoRATES rules
• Code Format: Prettier
• CoRATES MCP: Custom MCP server for CoRATES specific AI tooling
• AI Compatible: Claude plugins and skills, Cursor rules, and VS Code instructions
• Type Safety: TypeScript with tsconfig.json path aliases

Sync & Collaboration

• CRDT: Yjs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type)
• WebSocket: y-websocket for client-server sync
• Local Persistence: y-dexie for IndexedDB storage
• Protocol: y-protocols for Durable Objects communication

Monorepo Structure

• packages/web - React/TanStack Start frontend (deployed on Cloudflare Workers)
• packages/workers - Cloudflare Workers backend
• packages/ui - Shared UI component library
• packages/shared - Shared TypeScript utilities, types, and error definitions
• packages/docs - Vitepress documentation and guides
• packages/mcp - MCP server for development tools and documentation
• packages/stripe-dev - Stripe setup for Turbo

License

PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 - see LICENSE for details.

Author

Jacob Maynard