sci-brain

sci-brain

An AI-powered research brainstorming partner. Tell it a research topic — it helps you find good problems, think them through, and shape concrete research ideas together with you.

Works with Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode. Skill format inspired by superpowers.

Quick Start

Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add QuantumBFS/sci-brain

/plugin install sci-brain@sci-brain

Then type /ideas and start talking.

What /ideas Is Like

You start a conversation. The mentor asks about your background — you can describe yourself, or point it at your Zotero library or Google Scholar profile so it can learn from your papers directly.

Then you talk about what interests you. The mentor listens, makes connections, searches the literature, and presents a few directions tailored to your skills. Not as a menu — as a conversation. You pick what resonates, push back on what doesn't, combine things.

Once a direction clicks, the mentor helps you sharpen it — narrowing from "I'm interested in X" to a concrete, attackable research problem. It asks one question at a time, checks for prior art, flags risks honestly, and brings in references. You think, it fetches.

When you're done, it reflects on the conversation, recommends a reading, and offers to generate a structured write-up with full BibTeX references. Sessions are logged — the next time you run /ideas, it remembers where you left off.

Want Deeper Literature First?

/ideas searches the web as you talk, but if you want a thorough literature map before brainstorming, run /survey first. It searches in parallel across seven strategies — landscape mapping, adjacent fields, cross-vocabulary, cross-method, historical lineage, negative results, and benchmarks — and builds a registry with verified BibTeX.

When you run /ideas afterward, it automatically picks up the survey results and uses them to ground the conversation.

/survey              ← build a literature map
/ideas               ← brainstorm with that literature loaded

Want It to Know Your Work?

The fastest way is to add a few lines to CLAUDE.md (or AGENTS.md on other platforms):

# Research context
My Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XXXX
My research interests: quantum computing, tensor networks
I prefer rigorous theoretical work over empirical benchmarks.

If your Zotero isn't at the default ~/Zotero/:

# PDF library
My Zotero library is at ~/custom/path/Zotero/

You can also run /researchstyle to index your full paper collection (Zotero, PDF folder, or Google Scholar) into a registry the mentor can search during brainstorming. This happens automatically inside /ideas if you choose the Zotero or Scholar option — /researchstyle is only needed standalone if you want to set it up ahead of time.

Want to Save a Great Answer?

Type /quicknote anytime during a conversation. It captures the last substantive Q&A exchange, saves it as a markdown file in docs/discussion/notes/, and copies it to your clipboard — ready to paste into Slack, email, or share with a collaborator.

Want a Write-Up from a Past Session?

At the end of an /ideas session, the mentor offers to generate an ideas report. But if you skipped that, or want to revisit a past session, run /writer — it reads your conversation logs and produces a structured document (Typst, LaTeX, or Markdown) with the full reasoning trail and BibTeX references.

MCP Servers (Optional, Recommended)

These make literature search significantly deeper:

MCP server	What it adds
arxiv-mcp-server	Search arxiv by topic, download full papers
paper-search-mcp	PubMed, bioRxiv, CrossRef — essential for biomedical topics
Semantic Scholar MCP	Citation chains, related work, novelty checking
Zotero MCP	Search your existing library, read PDFs you already have

Without them, everything falls back to web search — still works, just less thorough.

Where Things Are Saved

• Survey registries — ~/.claude/survey/<topic>/ — persist across sessions, automatically loaded by /ideas
• Conversation logs — docs/discussion/ — each session is a timestamped file; the next session picks up where you left off
• Quick notes — docs/discussion/notes/ — individual Q&A snapshots from /quicknote
• Ideas reports — articles/ in your current directory, with a matching .bib file

Installation (Other Platforms)

Codex

Tell Codex: