Basic Usage¶

Learn the fundamentals of Lixplore.

Core Concepts¶

1. Sources¶

Lixplore searches 5 academic databases:

PubMed (-P): Biomedical and life sciences
arXiv (-x): Preprints in physics, math, CS, etc.
Crossref (-C): DOI database (130M+ records)
DOAJ (-J): Directory of Open Access Journals
EuropePMC (-E): Europe PubMed Central

2. Results Per Source¶

The -m flag specifies results per source:

# Single source: 50 results total
lixplore -P -q "cancer" -m 50

# All sources: 250 results total (5 sources × 50)
lixplore -A -q "cancer" -m 50

Use -D to deduplicate when using multiple sources.

3. Export Formats¶

Lixplore supports 10+ export formats:

Data: CSV, Excel (XLSX), JSON, XML
Citations: BibTeX, RIS, EndNote (Tagged & XML)
Formatted: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, IEEE

Common Workflows¶

Literature Review¶

#1. Comprehensive search
lixplore -A -q "your research topic" -m 100 -D --sort newest

# 2. Review interactively
lixplore -i

# 3. Export top 50
lixplore -S first:50 -X xlsx -o review.xlsx

Citation Management¶

# Search and export for LaTeX
lixplore -P -q "topic" -m 200 -X bibtex -o references.bib

# For EndNote/Mendeley
lixplore -P -q "topic" -m 200 -X ris -o references.ris

PDF Collection¶

# Find open access PDFs
lixplore -x -q "machine learning" -m 50 --show-pdf-links

# Download automatically
lixplore -x -q "neural networks" -m 30 --download-pdf

File Organization¶

Lixplore automatically organizes files:

~/
├── Lixplore_PDFs/              # Downloaded PDFs
│   ├── pubmed/
│   ├── arxiv/
│   └── scihub/
├── .lixplore_cache.json        # 7-day cache
├── .lixplore_annotations.json  # Your annotations
└── .lixplore/
    ├── profiles.json           # Saved profiles
    ├── templates/              # Export templates
    └── apis/                   # Custom APIs