[Beta]

Research tookit for human + AI agent workflows

A Python library +skills, prompts and more artifacts that gives AI agents a reliable, deterministic interface to search, fetch, store, and manage academic references. Think Zotero rebuilt as a machine-native primitive: no GUI, no human workflows — clean functions an agent can call with confidence.

Use AI agents confidently [agent-native-functions]
Increase Reference Quality [CSL-JSON · two-stage-model]
Explore and filter readings [staging → library]
Share a library with a research community [Ed25519 · LWW-sync]
Work offline, own your library [local-first · small AI compatible]
Get started GitHub

Get started

Two paths, one binary. Choose based on how you work with Claude.

Claude Desktop

For researchers using Claude.ai Projects — no terminal needed. Your agent handles setup.

01

Download the CLI and the manager skill

02

Upload both files to your Co-Work session and install the skill.

03

Ask the agent:

"Set up scholartools in my collection folder"
Full setup guide →

Claude Code

For technical users — manual setup from your collection directory.

01

Download the CLI

scht CLI
02

Unzip and make executable

unzip scht-*.zip && chmod +x scht
03

Run from your collection folder

./scht refs list

Creates .scholartools/config.json on first run.

CLI reference →

Research workflow

01

Discover

human "Find recent papers on transformer attention"
agent Searching Semantic Scholar, arXiv, and 4 more sources…
cli scht discover "transformer attention"
02

Fetch & Extract

human "Get the full record for this DOI"
agent Got it. Title, authors, abstract, DOI — all in one clean record.
cli scht fetch 10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762
03

Stage

human "Save these to review before committing"
agent Saved to staging. Nothing committed yet — you're still in control.
cli scht staging list
04

Merge

human "These look good — add them to the library"
agent Added to the library. Duplicates removed, citekeys assigned.
cli scht staging merge
05

File Archive

human "Attach this PDF to the reference"
agent PDF linked. vaswani2017 now has a file you can open or extract.
cli scht files attach vaswani2017 paper.pdf
06

Sync

human "Sync my library with the team"
agent Library synced. Your team sees the same records now.
cli scht sync push-changelog

Envisioned — not built yet

Find what you mean, not just what you typed [embeddings · vector-index · local-llm]
See how ideas connect and where the gaps are [graph-traversal · influence-chains · gap-detection]
Share context, not just references [structured-annotations · shareable · reference-objects]
Sync without giving up your infrastructure [ssh-server · garage-storage · self-hosted]

Beyond the reference

We envision a transition from isolated reference metadata to shared epistemic objects that enable deeper conversations.