paper-qa
High accuracy RAG for answering questions from scientific documents with citations
GraphCanon updated Sep 20, 2026 · GitHub synced Sep 20, 2026
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Decision brief
PaperQA2 version 5 is a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system optimized for extracting information from scientific documents, enhancing user queries with citations.
Good fit when
- Your project specifically requires processing and querying scientific documents, as PaperQA2 offers specialized capabilities tuned for this domain.
- You are integrating high-fidelity search functionalities into a tool targeting researchers or students who need to query scientific literature with accuracy.
Avoid when
- If your use case does not involve scientific document processing, another RAG system better suited to your specific type of documents (e.g., legal, medical) might be more fitting.
- In scenarios where real-time performance is critical and extensive indexing or access to external APIs for large-scale paper handling becomes a bottleneck.
- Requirements:
- Min 4 GB RAM
Observed Jul 12, 2026 · Source: enrich:decision_facts
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Maintenance and security
Full trust report- Maintenance
- Very active (5d since push)
- As of Aug 18, 2026
- Provenance
- Not a fork · Organization account
- As of Aug 18, 2026
- Security (OSV)
- No lockfile
- As of Jul 11, 2026
Public GitHub metadata and optional OSV scans. Signals, not a guarantee. Trust methodology.
Install
pip install paper-qaHow it fits your stack(9)
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Evidence and technical details
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Overview
PaperQA2 version 5 offers a robust retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach specifically tailored for processing and querying scientific document content, using LLMs to enhance its capabilities.
Capability facts
- CLI
- CLI entrypoint
Source: pyproject.toml:[project.scripts] · Aug 18, 2026
- Languages
- python
Source: github.language+pyproject.toml · Aug 18, 2026
Categories
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Compatibility
Sourced claims from the README excerpt - not unsourced marketing copy.
Source: README excerpt (regex_v1, Aug 18, 2026)
Note version 5 requires Python 3.11+.Source link
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README
Installation For a non development setup, install PaperQA2 (aka version 5) from PyPI. Note version 5 requires Python 3.11+. For development setup, please refer to the CONTRIBUTING.md file. PaperQA2 uses an LLM to operate, so you'll need to either set an appropriate [API key envir...
For agents
This page has a .md twin and JSON over the API.