Show HN: 35k+ paper psychedelic library that knows LSD from Lumpy Skin Disease

Search observation: What you're noticing with search is the currently intended behavior, but you raise an interesting point. I'm using tsvector for Postgres full-text search over title, abstract, etc. with prefix matching, specifically in English. The stemmer doesn't decompose Sanskrit so "brahmavihara" and "vihara" are separate tokens matching legitimately separate papers. Then it falls back to the embedding geometry to search by meaning instead of strings.

That said, there's enough Sanskrit going on in contemplative papers that a synonym/variant layer for Pali and Sanskrit vocabulary is a pretty good idea. There's a lot of German and Portugese in the corpus as well, so upgrading the search to account for all these languages is a great feature idea.

Tech question: There's actually zero LLM involvement at all regarding citations or references in this project. That all comes from OpenAlex API. LLMs only do relevance gating, study detail abstraction, and evidence synthesis summaries.

Google has a moat in the sense they have no API and don't license anything to anyone, so nobody builds on it and the open ecosystem of sources I'm using is the same as what AI products use. Gemini is trained on the same sources this library uses (and recently, this library itself) and the Google Scholar vault is in my opinion, pretty useless given the open ecosystem available.

Research question: the most mind-blowing results I've discovered are in an unexpected direction - it is wild how thin and low-confidence the evidence is for basically any claim regarding psychedelics, due primarily to functional unblinding and low sample size and diversity. The hype cycle is way beyond science can keep grounded.

Here's an example (disclaimer, it's my own published research!): A recent study reported an effect size for mebufotenin exceeding the theoretical maximum for antidepressants, implying methodological issues account for the results. https://consciousnesslibrary.org/research/52248-blinding-int...

Another "mind-blowing" observation is the sheer volume of consciousness work outside the psychedelic hype cycle. A full half of the corpus is on meditation or philosophy of mind, not related to psychedelics. And we still are so far from understanding the "hard problem.

Development question: I have plans to extend this indefinitely, and your factoid idea is interesting. The "study at a glance" might have most of what you're asking about already on each article, but taking that a step further, it could be cool to have a cross-corpus browsable feed of those. I'll also be integrating data from a project by Josie Kins (maker of https://effectindex.com) on psychedelic substance topics in particular for dose info and potentially trip reports, but that's a little orthogonal to what you're suggesting.

Let me know if you mean something more about factoids than the "study at a glance" and the potential to have those be aggregated in a browsable way and I'll see what I can think of.

I haven't bit off more than I can chew yet, my plan is to work on it until that's the case OR there's just nothing left to do in the scope of the project.

Thanks a lot for your comment!