Ison Slate is Epithre’s academic research workspace. Ask it a research question and it searches eleven academic sources at once, then writes a cited research report.
Slate has been live at slate.isonai.net for some time. IsonAI, IsonSearch, and Strata each received a proper introduction on this blog; Slate did not. This post is that overdue introduction.
We built Slate for people doing real academic work in Indonesia: undergraduate and graduate students working on literature reviews and theses, lecturers keeping up with their fields, and policy researchers who need evidence-based briefs.
Eleven sources, two of them Indonesian
Nine of Slate’s eleven sources are international indexes: OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, PubMed, arXiv, CrossRef, EuropePMC, DOAJ, BASE, and CORE.
The other two set it apart for Indonesia. Garuda indexes Indonesian journals. BPS provides official Indonesian statistics. Global research tools generally do not index either one.
The difference shows on Indonesian topics. Slate surfaces far more SINTA-accredited local journals than international indexes do, while still covering the international literature. A question about an Indonesian subject gets the local studies and the global context together.
Reports you can verify
Every report comes with a numbered bibliography with DOI links, so you can trace citations back to the original papers. Citations export in APA, MLA, Chicago, or numeric style, and BibTeX export works with reference managers like Zotero and Mendeley.
Slate also labels journal quality: SJR quartiles (Q1-Q4) for international journals, SINTA ranks (1-6) for Indonesian journals. You can judge the credibility of each source at a glance instead of looking every journal up yourself.
Reading the evidence, not just listing it
A stack of papers is not an answer. Slate can classify whether each paper supports, contradicts, or gives mixed evidence for your research question, then write an evidence synthesis that summarizes where the weight of evidence points and flags where the papers disagree.
When the report is done, you can keep asking follow-up questions. The answers keep citing the report’s sources, so the conversation stays grounded in the same bibliography.
Notebook and report options
Slate also works with documents you already have. Upload your PDFs to Notebook and Slate indexes them, then answers questions with page-level quotations, so you can check each answer against the page it came from. Notebook accepts PDF only for now.
Reports come in three depths: Quick at around 500 words, Standard at around 1,500, and Deep at 3,000 or more. You choose the report language (Indonesian or English) and the audience (academic, policy, or general). Finished reports can be saved, searched in a library, grouped into collections, and shared by link.
Where to try it
Ison Slate is live at slate.isonai.net. Sign in with an IsonAI account and start with a question you are actually researching.
Slate runs on hardware we operate in Indonesia, and data stays in-country.