scidock 0.1.0

CLI interface for finding, downloading and managing scientific articles

SciDock

SciDock is a CLI tool designed to provide a user-friendly interface for finding, downloading and managing scientific articles of your interest!

Installation

pip install scidock

You must have Python 3.12+ installed!

Development installation

After installing Poetry on your system, run these commands:

git clone https://github.com/kgleba/scidock.git
cd scidock
poetry shell
poetry install

Usage

To initialize a repository (and set it as a default), run:

scidock init /path/to/repository

To perform a search, execute:

scidock search 'query'

Note that the reason we do not explicitly ask you to provide author name/title/abstract/etc. but rather provide a free-form query is that all of this work is done in the background by Natural Language Processing models.

To try and download the paper with a known DOI, execute:

scidock download 'DOI'

To set up a proxy (see the "Supported Resources" section for use cases), use scidock config:

scidock config proxy PROXY_TYPE IP PORT

where PROXY_TYPE is either http or socks5 (depending on the type of proxy you are using).

For example:

scidock config proxy socks5 127.0.0.1 1080

You can now force other commands (like search and download) to make the appropriate network requests through the proxy by passing the --proxy flag

To open locally stored PDFs in your standard viewer, run with free-form request:

scidock open 'query'

Planning to introduce new features soon: e.g. to cite any of the papers stored in the local database.

Aesthetically pleasing demos will also appear here soon :D

Supported resources

✔️ CrossRef (for searching through an enormous database with extensive metadata for each entry)

✔️ arXiv (for searching and downloading freely published preprints)

✔️ Sci-Hub (for downloading paywalled PDFs by given DOI; might require a proxy though)

❌ Google Scholar (yet)

❌ GeneralIndex

❌ Anna's Archive

Limitations

• Proxies do not support authentication
• Performance still requires attention
• Some parts of the system are still poorly configurable or not configurable at all