dsh-research

From nothing to a read paper

Five steps, about twenty minutes, fifteen of which are waiting for dependencies. You end having searched the literature and read one paper in full — a routine you can repeat.

  1. Install DeepSeek Harness

    Needs Node 22.19 or newer. Install it globally rather than running it through npx: a stable version matters more than always having the newest one. New to dsh entirely? Skim the official quickstart first.

    npm install -g @deepseek-ai/dsh

  2. Install the research plugin market

    Install this one first. It adds a Research plugins page to Settings, and everything else installs from there without going back to a terminal.

    dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-research

    If you already know what you want, take the whole workbench in one paste instead: dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-research dsh-ai4scholar dsh-academy

  3. Add the literature tools and a key

    Run dsh web, open 127.0.0.1:3080, go to Settings → Research plugins, install dsh-ai4scholar, then press Restart dsh in the panel.

    When it comes back, go to Settings → Plugins → AI4Scholar and paste a key from ai4scholar.net.

    The key goes into the dsh credential store — never into the conversation, never to the model. arXiv, bioRxiv and DOI full text need no key, so you can skip this and come back.

  4. Your first search

    Ask in plain language. The guidance forbids answering from memory, so the agent searches before it asserts.

    “Find the strongest evidence from the last three years on your topic, sorted by citations, and tell me what each one concludes.”

    The answer ends with the credits this turn spent and what is left. The free sources — arXiv, bioRxiv, DOI full text — are not billed.

  5. Read it in full, then cite it

    Pick one and have it read the full text — the PDF body, not the abstract. Full text comes back in slices, so it reads what the question needs instead of dumping the whole PDF into context.

    “Read the methods of 10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2 — how are the controls designed?”

    When you are writing, paste your own paragraph and ask for citations: auto_cite marks where each claim needs one and returns a checkable reference list (billed, 20–90 s).

What else it does

Once the literature tools are in, these work by asking.

🕸

Citation graph

Walk references and citations in both directions, then pull recommendations of nearby work, until the thread of a topic is in hand.

✍️

Auto-cite

Paste a paragraph you wrote: it marks each claim that needs a citation and returns a checkable reference list.

🎨

Scientific figures

Generate, restyle, compose and critique figures, SVG included — mechanism and pipeline diagrams without opening a drawing app.

🧑‍🔬

Authors & recommendations

Trace an author’s publication line, or start from one paper you like and ask for similar work.

Common questions

The install printed peer dependency warnings — is that broken?

No. Those @deepseek-ai/* packages resolve at runtime to the global dsh install rather than into the profile. The official plugin market prints the same warnings.

It failed to start with EADDRINUSE

Another dsh is still running — often one whose terminal window was closed, leaving the process adopted by the system. Find it with lsof -nP -iTCP:3080 -sTCP:LISTEN and kill it.

I installed a plugin and nothing changed

The profile is read at boot, so a newly installed plugin needs a restart. Refreshing the page is not enough.

How are credits counted?

Semantic Scholar, PubMed and Google Scholar searches, auto-cite and figures are billed per call, and every answer ends with what it spent and what is left. arXiv, bioRxiv/medRxiv and DOI full-text extraction are free.

Can I install just one of the packages?

Yes — the three are independent layers. dsh-ai4scholar is search on its own, dsh-research is the market panel itself, and dsh-academy is only the behaviour rules.