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Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

[Unreleased]

Added

  • Cloud Notebook Support — Added examples/cloud_notebook_template.ipynb demonstrating secure API key management and direct GitHub installation for Google Colab and Kaggle.
  • Programmatic API — scholare.config.load_config now natively accepts Python dictionaries, allowing the entire pipeline to run without file I/O.
  • BibTeX Exporter — Added scholare/exporters.py to automatically generate .bib files, extracting author metadata from Semantic Scholar.
  • Documentation Site — Configured a complete MkDocs (Material theme) website with automated GitHub Pages deployment.
  • OpenAlex integration — Replaced SerpAPI with OpenAlex for primary literature searches, eliminating paywalled rate limits.
  • Preprint server integration — Added concurrent querying of arXiv and bioRxiv/medRxiv APIs.
  • Unpaywall API — Added lookup capability to dynamically find open-access PDFs via DOI when native sources fail.
  • Smart deduplication — Added pipeline layer to merge and deduplicate results across all new search engines.
  • CLI Flags — Added --no-download flag to disable PDF saving without modifying the config file.

Changed

  • Semantic Scholar search — Now prioritizes searching by DOI directly to ensure maximum accuracy during metadata enrichment.
  • Config requirements — serp_api_key is no longer required. unpaywall_email, use_arxiv, and use_biorxiv options added.

[1.0.0] — 2026-02-25

  • Google Scholar search via SerpAPI with automatic pagination
  • Semantic Scholar enrichment — abstracts, TLDRs, open-access URLs, DOIs, code/data hints
  • Config-driven pipeline — JSON config for any research topic
  • Keyword-based categorization with configurable category → keyword mapping
  • Open-access PDF downloading with filename sanitization
  • Visualizations — category pie chart, open-access bar chart, citation histogram, year timeline
  • Structured Markdown research notes — executive summary, taxonomy, top-cited, per-category breakdown, full index
  • Run comparison — detect new papers vs. a previous CSV
  • Auto-named output folders — <date>_<search_terms>/ for easy organization
  • CLI entry point — scholare --config <path>
  • API key management via .env file