Install and first run

Radiowriter is a Python program. It starts a server on your own computer and serves a page to your browser. The server accepts connections only from the same computer, so another device on your network cannot open it.

Install

The command is the same on macOS, Linux and Windows:

uv tool install radiowriter

Installing from the repository

uv tool install git+https://github.com/gmadevs/Radiowriter installs the current state of the main branch, including changes that have not been released yet.

To start it:

radiowriter

It prints the address and opens http://localhost:8501 in your browser. Ctrl+C in the terminal stops it.

If you do not have uv

macOS and Linux:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Windows, in PowerShell:

powershell -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

If you already have pipx, pipx install radiowriter also works.

To update, run uv tool upgrade radiowriter. To remove it, run uv tool uninstall radiowriter. Uninstalling leaves your archive in place.

First run

The first screen asks for an email address.

PubMed and Unpaywall require a contact address in every request. They use it to reach you if your requests cause a problem. You do not create an account, no confirmation mail is sent, and the address is stored only on your computer.

Three other settings are optional:

Setting	What it does
NCBI API key	Raises the rate limit from 3 to 10 requests a second. Free, from your NCBI account settings.
Semantic Scholar API key	Makes citation lookups faster. Lookups also work without a key.
LibKey library ID	Gives direct full-text links through your library's subscription. It is your library's Third Iron ID, the number in libkey.io/libraries/<ID>/….

You can add them later under ⚙️ Settings in the sidebar.

Journal quartiles

Quartiles need no setup. A copy of the SCImago table for 2025 is included. It is loaded at the first start and your articles are matched to it by ISSN. 📊 Journal metrics in the sidebar shows how many articles were matched.

Using a newer year

1. Go to scimagojr.com/journalrank.php.
2. Click Download data, at the top right of the table.
3. Put the CSV in the folder that radiowriter --where prints.
4. In the app, open 📊 Journal metrics in the sidebar and click ↻ Reload the file and re-match.

A file whose name starts with scimagojr is used in place of the included copy, even if its data is older. If there are several, the last one in alphabetical order is used, so scimagojr 2026.csv is chosen over scimagojr 2025.csv. radiowriter --where prints which file is in use.

Licence of the SCImago data

The included file is SCImago's data, used under CC BY-NC. It has been reduced to the columns the app reads and to the rows of type "journal". The values are unmodified. radiowriter/data/scimagojr-2025.about.txt records the download date and what was removed. The NonCommercial term applies to that file.

Where the data is stored

radiowriter --where

macOS	~/Library/Application Support/Radiowriter
Linux	~/.local/share/radiowriter (or $XDG_DATA_HOME/radiowriter)
Windows	%LOCALAPPDATA%\Radiowriter

The archive is one SQLite file. To store it somewhere else, for example on an external disk or in a synced folder, set RADIOWRITER_HOME:

RADIOWRITER_HOME=/Volumes/work/radiowriter radiowriter

Read Backup and moving computer before you copy the file.