Show HN: PaperQA2, Agentic RAG for Science

We're excited to release PaperQA2, an open source RAG library specialized to work with the scientific literature. We've seen some really compelling results with it (https://paper.wikicrow.ai), like superhuman performance at question answering and summarization when compared with expert scientists.

PaperQA2 is a major overhaul of our prior PaperQA system, it includes automatically obtained rich metadata for each paper, a CLI to work with local papers directly, a local full-text search engine for keywords searches over PDF files, a state-of-the-art algorithm for LLM-based re-ranking and contextual summarization (RCS), the ability to agentic RAG, and support for all LiteLLM compatible LLMs.

We hope that folks are able to use PaperQA2 to help improve their scientific workflows and the way they interact with the literature. It's enabled many cool projects for us like (WikiCrow and ContraCrow), and we hope to see many more in the future.