grantscan

Which of our papers acknowledged this grant?

Research groups have to answer that question repeatedly: for a funder's final report, for a renewal, for an institutional review. The answer is buried in the acknowledgment paragraph of every paper the group has published, and the codes themselves are unmemorable strings like RTG 4200/1 or 900123456.

Answering it by hand means opening papers one at a time and reading the small print at the end of each. Answering it with a normal search is worse than it sounds, because a code that reads cleanly on the page rarely survives being extracted from a PDF: it breaks across a line, loses its spaces, or fuses to the word beside it. Searching for what you can see gets you a fraction of what is there.

grantscan reads a folder of papers once and then answers that question in milliseconds, for one code or for a whole reporting portfolio, showing you the sentence each answer rests on so you can judge it rather than trust it.

It also answers the question a spreadsheet cannot: which of the codes you asked about appear in no paper at all. For a report you have to sign, that is usually the line that matters.

Getting it

Download grantscan.exe from the latest release and double-click it. It needs no installation, no Python, and no network.

Or, with Python 3.12 or newer:

pip install grantscan
grantscan

Using it

The user guide is written for the people who will use this rather than work on it. In short: add your folders, list the codes you care about, press Search.

Papers are read on your computer. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Working on it

DESIGN.md explains how it is put together and why, including what was measured to decide it.

uv sync
uv run pytest
uv run ruff check .
uv run ruff format .
uv run mypy
uv run grantscan

Dependencies are managed with uv add, never by editing pyproject.toml.

Licence

MIT. It reads PDFs with pypdfium2 over Google's PDFium, which is BSD-3-Clause, and draws its interface with Qt through PySide6, which is LGPL-3.0.