Search the open scholarly record across several indexes at once.

sources is a comma-separated list. Available: openalex ~250M works, all disciplines, open catalogue europepmc ~45M biomedical records, ~6M with open full text semanticscholar citation graph, open-PDF pointer, one-line summaries arxiv physics/quant-bio/CS preprints doaj articles in fully open-access journals openaire European repositories and funder outputs core ~300M repository records (needs a free API key)

The repository sources matter for paywalled work: a closed paper very often has a legal author manuscript deposited under a funder mandate.

Results are merged and de-duplicated on DOI. Each carries open-access status, licence, and whether full text is retrievable.

allow_external exists because a free-text query leaves this machine. Set confidential_mode in configure() to make that an explicit decision per call.

Resolve a DOI, PMID, PMCID or title to full metadata plus every legal route to its full text. Does not download anything.

Download the best legal full text for a paper into the local library, extract its text, and index it. Prefers sectioned XML over PDF because XML preserves headings, which makes 'what did the Methods say' answerable.

Papers that cite this one. The route to the paper you did not know to search for: a keyword sweep only returns what you already thought to ask.

The bibliography of a paper, resolved to real records.

Reading a paper's reference list is how you find the work that nobody in your subfield cites. Accepts DOI:10.x, PMID:123, arXiv:1234.5678.

Draft a reprint request to the corresponding author.

The pre-internet norm and still the highest-yield route for a genuinely unavailable paper. Authors may lawfully share their own work for scholarly correspondence. Returns the draft; it does not send anything.

Full-text search across every paper already on this machine.

This is the tool to reach for FIRST. A paper on disk that nobody searched is invisible in exactly the way a paywalled one is, and the failure is quieter. Supports FTS5 syntax: phrases in "quotes", AND/OR/NOT, prefix*.

Read a paper held locally, optionally one section of it.

section matches a heading case-insensitively, e.g. 'methods', 'surface plasmon', 'results'. With no section, returns the abstract plus a list of available headings, so a long paper can be read deliberately rather than dumped into context.

Index a directory of papers already on disk so lib_search can find them.

Handles PDF, JATS XML and text. limit of 0 means no cap; any other value caps the scan and the result says so explicitly, because a capped scan reported as a total is how an inventory lies.

What the local library holds, and the current configuration.

Metadata and the PRIMARY CITATION for a PDB entry.

Coordinates do not carry the analysis. If a design rests on a structure it rests on the paper that deposited it, and that paper is one lookup away. Resolves the DOI by title when RCSB omits it, which it often does for older entries, i.e. exactly the ones nobody has read.

UniProt record: sequence, features, and cross-referenced PDB entries.

Set the contact address, library location, or confidential mode.

The email goes to the polite pools of Crossref, Unpaywall, OpenAlex and NCBI. They ask for it, grant higher rate limits in return, and it is the only personal datum this tool sends anywhere.

confidential_mode 'on' blocks free-text queries from leaving the machine unless a call passes allow_external=true. Identifier lookups still work, since a DOI carries no unpublished reasoning.

Show what this tool has sent off the machine, most recent last.