Scholar Pages

Scholar Pages is a customisable Astro theme for academic portfolios, research profiles, and personal scholar websites. It follows a content-first workflow: profile details live in one TypeScript configuration file, publications stay in BibTeX files, structured records in YAML, and posts in Markdown or MDX. The theme builds a static site with pages for home, about, research, teaching, projects, and a year-grouped posts archive.

What is Scholar Pages?

Scholar Pages is an open-source static site theme built on the Astro framework, maintained by jxpeng98 on GitHub. It takes author information from a site.config.ts file, publications from src/data/publications.bib, and other content from YAML files and Markdown or MDX posts, then outputs a static site with separate pages for research, teaching, projects, and posts. It requires Node.js 22.13 or newer and pnpm 11 or newer, and is released under the MIT License.

Key Features

• Designed for academic work — present publications, appointments, teaching, projects, service, awards, and research notes in a consistent editorial layout.
• Content-first workflow — manage publications with BibTeX, structured records with YAML, and posts with Markdown or MDX; optional YAML fields can be omitted and empty elements are not rendered.
• Responsive and theme-aware — polished desktop and mobile layouts include light and dark modes.
• Useful research navigation — filter publications, projects, and teaching records without duplicating page navigation.
• Flexible home page — enable or hide the hero, selected publications, and latest posts via the homeBlocks settings.
• SEO-ready output — canonical URLs, Open Graph metadata, JSON-LD, sitemap, and generated robots.txt are included.
• Versioned template updates — releases use SemVer tags and arrive as reviewable pull requests, with protected paths in .template-sync.json preserving personal content.

Who Should Use Scholar Pages?

Scholar Pages is aimed at anyone who needs a clean, low-maintenance academic website with structured research content. Academic researchers and faculty can display publications, teaching, and service in one consistent layout. PhD students and postdocs can create a personal profile with filterable research outputs and a research-note blog. Independent scholars can publish a search-engine-friendly profile with JSON-LD structured data.

What Can You Do With Scholar Pages?

• Maintain a filterable publication list — add papers to publications.bib with standard BibTeX fields plus a public field that groups entries into Publication, Working Paper, Work in Progress, or Other on the research page.
• Document teaching and projects — edit YAML files for about, projects, and teaching, supporting course codes, summaries, tags, highlights, metadata, and multiple links.
• Publish posts and research notes — create Markdown or MDX files in src/content/posts/ with frontmatter for title, description, publish date, tags, and draft status; draft: true keeps a post out of the generated site.

How Does Scholar Pages Work?

Create a new site using GitHub's "Use this template" button or with pnpm create astro@latest my-scholar-site --template jxpeng98/astro-theme-scholars, then edit the sample identity in site.config.ts, add your publications to the BibTeX file, edit the YAML data files, and replace sample posts. Run pnpm verify (tests, Astro checks, build, and assertions) before deploying the static dist/ folder to any host.

Deployment

Build with pnpm build to produce a static dist/ directory, then deploy to static hosts such as Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, Netlify, or GitHub Pages. Template updates are delivered as pull requests via a GitHub Action that checks for releases every Monday.