README

Nexus Scholar Core is a PHP 8.3+ package for building systematic literature review workflows in Laravel applications. It provides reusable services for academic search, corpus normalization, deduplication, screening, citation-network analysis, legal open-access full-text retrieval, and export auditing.

The package is designed as a reusable engine. Domain and application code depend on ports and value objects; Laravel-specific infrastructure lives behind service-provider bindings, migrations, jobs, events, and Eloquent-backed repositories.

Ecosystem Role

core is the public package boundary of Nexus Scholar. It keeps the scholarly workflow logic reusable while host applications own product concerns, local project layout, credentials, and user experience.

nexus-scholar/nexus-cli is the local research-workspace host for command-line review workflows.
nexus-scholar/nexus-web is the hosted Laravel/Inertia product shell.
nexus-scholar/graph-core and nexus-scholar/graph-algorithms provide the graph foundation used by citation-network features.
nexus-scholar/refmanager covers bibliographic import/export support around RIS, BibTeX, CSL-JSON, and EndNote XML.

What It Provides

Search orchestration across arXiv, Crossref, DOAJ, IEEE, OpenAlex, PubMed, and Semantic Scholar.
YAML search plans, provider selection, rate limits, cache identity, and persisted search provenance.
Scholarly work normalization with stable internal identity and provider/external identifier tracking.
Deduplication policies, representative selection, cluster persistence, and corpus locking.
Deterministic, LLM-assisted, council, and human adjudication screening workflows.
Screening run comparison for reviewer, criteria, and model-output analysis.
Citation, co-citation, and bibliographic-coupling graph builders with metrics and exports.
Legal open-access full-text retrieval through direct URLs, Unpaywall, PubMed Central, Europe PMC, arXiv, OpenAlex metadata, and Semantic Scholar metadata sources.
Bibliography, graph, and network export history with host-facing read ports.
Laravel package integration through config, migrations, repositories, commands, jobs, events, listeners, and reader APIs.

Installation

Install the package with Composer:

composer require nexus-scholar/core

Publish the Laravel configuration and migrations:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag="nexus-config"
php artisan vendor:publish --tag="nexus-migrations"
php artisan migrate

Set the operational contact values used by retrieval and provider workflows:

NEXUS_MAIL_TO=you@example.com
NEXUS_UNPAYWALL_EMAIL=you@example.com

Provider API keys are optional unless a provider requires them. Keep real credentials in the host application's environment, not in source control.

Package Commands

The package registers only reusable package-owned commands:

php artisan nexus:search --file=queries.yml --all --project=my-project
php artisan nexus:screen --project=my-project --include="tomato segmentation" --exclude="medical imaging"

Applications that need richer command-line workflows should wrap the package handlers and ports in their own console commands. Keep review policy and scholarly workflow behavior in core; let host applications own input parsing, presentation, local file layout, and project-specific conventions.

Application Surface

Laravel applications consume the package through handlers, ports, value objects, published migrations, configuration, and reader APIs. The service provider binds the shipped repositories, provider clients, jobs, events, lifecycle listeners, and application services.

Common integration points include:

search execution and search-plan services;
deduplication and corpus lock/unlock handlers;
screening, adjudication, and screening comparison handlers;
full-text retrieval handlers;
citation graph build, analysis, shortest path, snowballing, and export handlers;
bibliography and network export handlers;
export history, job lifecycle, and full-text fetch reader ports.

Documentation

The v1 documentation lives in docs/v1.0 and is published with MkDocs through GitHub Pages.

Quality Gates

Run the package checks from the repository root:

composer validate --strict
composer audit --format=plain --abandoned=ignore
composer test
composer analyse
composer format:check

The provider test lane is fixture-backed. CI must not depend on live provider network calls.

Build the documentation locally with:

python -m pip install -r requirements-docs.txt
mkdocs build --strict

License

Nexus Scholar Core is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.

nexus-scholar / core

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