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ahmetk1212/sciscout

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

3PythonAudience · researcherComplexity · 3/5LicenseSetup · moderate

TLDR

SciScout is an AI research agent that searches 12 trusted academic sources, reads the papers it finds, and answers scientific questions with citations.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((sciscout))
    What it does
      Searches 12 sources
      Reads papers and PDFs
      Synthesizes cited answers
    Tech stack
      Python
      FastAPI
      Groq and Gemini
    Use cases
      Scientific Q&A
      Single source search
      REST API integration
    Audience
      Researchers
      Engineers

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Ask a scientific or engineering question and get a cited, synthesized answer from multiple academic sources.

USE CASE 2

Search a single source like arXiv directly without invoking a language model.

USE CASE 3

Run the tool as a REST API server to integrate research answers into another app.

USE CASE 4

Ask questions in Turkish or another language and have them automatically translated for academic search.

What is it built with?

PythonFastAPIPyMuPDFGroqGemini

How does it compare?

ahmetk1212/sciscout0marildo/imago100/geotwitter
Stars333
LanguagePythonPythonPython
Last pushed2015-09-10
MaintenanceDormant
Setup difficultymoderateeasymoderate
Complexity3/52/53/5
Audienceresearchergeneralgeneral

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Requires API keys for at least one LLM provider and optionally several source APIs, most with free tiers.

Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice.

In plain English

SciScout is an AI research agent that answers scientific and engineering questions by searching trusted academic and technical sources, reading the papers it finds, and writing back a synthesized answer with citations attached. It can take a question in Turkish or another language and translates it into an English academic search query before running the search, so people who do not normally write in English can still use it. Under the hood it works as a small pipeline of three roles. A researcher step translates the question and searches across multiple sources, ranking what it finds. A reader step pulls out the actual content, including reading full PDF text when just the abstract is not enough. A synthesizer step then writes the final answer with inline citation footnotes pointing back to the sources used. It searches twelve sources in total, including arXiv, Semantic Scholar, PubMed, Europe PMC, NASA ADS, DOAJ, Wikipedia, GitHub, StackExchange, Google Scholar, Reddit, and a general trusted-domain web search provider. For the language model itself, it routes between several providers such as Groq, Cerebras, and Gemini, automatically falling back to another one if the first is unavailable. You can use it from a command line interface with commands to ask a question, search a single source directly without invoking the model, run an interactive chat session, or start it as a FastAPI web server with health, ask, streaming, and search endpoints. Getting it running means cloning the project, creating a Python virtual environment, installing it, and filling in a few API keys in an environment file, several of which have free tiers. The README lists known limitations: some of the sources it queries can rate-limit or throttle requests, and its Google Scholar search relies on scraping the site, which can break if Google changes its page layout. It is released under the MIT license.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Help me install SciScout and configure API keys for Groq, Gemini, and Tavily in the .env file.
Prompt 2
Show me how to run sciscout ask to get a cited answer about recent quantum error correction research.
Prompt 3
Explain how the researcher, reader, and synthesizer pipeline works in this project.
Prompt 4
Walk me through starting the FastAPI server and calling the streaming ask endpoint.

Frequently asked questions

What is sciscout?

SciScout is an AI research agent that searches 12 trusted academic sources, reads the papers it finds, and answers scientific questions with citations.

What language is sciscout written in?

Mainly Python. The stack also includes Python, FastAPI, PyMuPDF.

What license does sciscout use?

Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice.

How hard is sciscout to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.

Who is sciscout for?

Mainly researcher.

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