Synectic-Research/research-scan

Research Scan finds and ranks recent scientific papers that matter most for a specific research
question, project, or decision. Starting from a brief or a single question, it retrieves the
literature, expands through citation graphs, measures coverage, verifies every DOI against the live
record, and emits evidence objects — while the agent driving it plans the queries, screens the
candidates and ranks the shortlist. It is an evidence pipeline for a reasoning agent, not an
assistant that answers questions.
Documentation:
The work is split in two, deliberately.
The CLI is deterministic and model-free. It retrieves across OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar and
arXiv, walks the citation graph, dedups, counts coverage per criterion, shortlists, verifies every
DOI against the live record, applies the selection rules and renders the result. It contains no LLM
SDK and makes no judgement about a paper.
The agent supplies the cognition. Planning the queries, scoring each candidate 0–3, writing gap
queries when coverage is thin, and reranking the shortlist are all model decisions. The skill
packages the rubrics they are made against, as plain Markdown in skills/research-scan/references/;
whatever agent hosts it executes them.
Files are the interface between the two halves: the filesystem is the protocol boundary between
reasoning and execution, not a storage detail. That is what lets Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or a
plain Python loop drive the same chain over the same artifacts.
brief ─▶ [plan queries] ─▶ retrieve ─▶ [screen 0–3] ─▶ expand ─▶ [screen] ─▶ coverage
─▶ [gap round, if coverage is thin] ─▶ shortlist ─▶ [rerank] ─▶ verify ─▶ emit
Bracketed steps are the agent's; the rest are CLI stages.
Two things bound the result. A purpose — build, research or orient — decides what a paper
has to do to earn a slot. A profile — quick, standard or deep — decides how much the scan
costs. Both are described under How it works.
Output is a run directory of validated JSON plus a Markdown brief you can hand to a human, in which
every paper's DOI, title, year and first author were checked against the live record.
## Install
Python ≥ 3.11 and uv.
bash
uvx research-scan doctor # run any command without installing
uv tool install research-scan # or put it on PATH permanently
## Configure
configure asks for each credential, shows what is already set, writes
~/.config/research-scan/.env with mode 0600 inside a 0700 directory, and finishes by running
doctor.
bash
research-scan configure # setup is an alias for the same command
Keys are read without echo. Re-running is safe: every variable shows its current value masked to the
last four characters, Enter keeps it, typing replaces it. Anything already in the file that
configure does not ask about — comments included — is left exactly as it was. If stdin is not a
terminal it prints the file to write and exits 2 rather than hanging, which is the behaviour you
want in a Dockerfile or a provisioning script.
| Variable | Needed for |
| OPENALEXAPIKEY | OpenAlex, the primary source. Required; doctor exits 3 without it. |
| OPENALEXMAILTO | Strongly recommended. Raises OpenAlex to 5 req/s and joins the Crossref polite pool. |