SciFork

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Fork hypotheses. Connect evidence. Advance research.

SciFork is a local, Git-native biomedical Research Graph plugin for DeepSeek Harness (DSH). DSH Chat remains the only conversation surface; SciFork opens a same-origin Graph Companion for organizing research questions, hypotheses, evidence, results, and findings.

Your Research Project remains a collection of ordinary Markdown and JSON files in a local Git repository. The graph is a rebuildable view of those files, not a separate database, and SciFork does not upload the project or add cloud sync.

Early release: SciFork 0.0.3 is pinned to the public interfaces in DSH 0.1.1-rc.2.

What you can do

• Turn an open research question into a connected, inspectable Research Graph.
• Bring in literature evidence identified by PMID or DOI, including material retrieved from PubMed with the bundled Skill.
• Keep research-team Results separate from interpretations and untested Hypotheses.
• Inspect the whole project in Main view or focus on an entity's direct assertions in Evidence view.
• Click Research & Expand to run one literature-grounded expansion from the current Focus. Each click is limited to one step and at most five direct, low-confidence branches.
• After a successful research change, attempt a local Git checkpoint containing only files that SciFork manages.

Install

Requirements

• DSH 0.1.1-rc.2 with the Web profile
• Node.js ^22.19.0 || >=24.0.0
• pnpm 11.23.0 (Git source builds require Corepack and its pnpm shim)
• Git with user.name and user.email configured
• DSH Web configured for local loopback access (127.0.0.1)

Install from GitHub source

Enable the Corepack pnpm shim before installing:

corepack enable pnpm

If corepack is missing (including Node.js 25+ installations), install it first with npm install --global corepack, then enable the shim. This makes nested pnpm install calls select the version pinned by SciFork.

An ERR_PNPM_BAD_PM_VERSION error can mean that a different global pnpm is handling Git preparation even when the outer command uses Corepack. Run corepack enable pnpm and retry from a terminal using that shim. In a SciFork checkout, corepack pnpm exec pnpm --version must print 11.23.0; corepack pnpm verify:source checks this and performs an isolated source install.

Source installation is supported starting with v0.0.2. DSH Plugin Hub uses this route when SciFork has no npm package. The install builds dist/ locally from the Git source:

dsh plugin --profile web add git+https://github.com/zhang-bin-98/sci-fork.git

If pnpm blocks the Git dependency's prepare script, use the exact allowBuilds key and profile pnpm-workspace.yaml path printed by DSH, then run the same command again. Do not guess or broaden the allowed key.

After installation, restart DSH if it is already running. Start DSH from the directory you want to use as the Research Project:

dsh --profile web

Install from GitHub Releases

Use the prebuilt archive when you want to verify the published checksum or avoid running the source build locally.

1. Download dsh-scifork-0.0.3.tgz and dsh-scifork-0.0.3.tgz.sha256 from the GitHub Releases page.
2. Put both files in the same directory and verify the archive.

Linux:

sha256sum -c dsh-scifork-0.0.3.tgz.sha256

macOS:

shasum -a 256 -c dsh-scifork-0.0.3.tgz.sha256

Windows PowerShell:

$archive = 'dsh-scifork-0.0.3.tgz'
$expected = (Get-Content "$archive.sha256").Split()[0].ToLowerInvariant()
$actual = (Get-FileHash $archive -Algorithm SHA256).Hash.ToLowerInvariant()
if ($actual -ne $expected) { throw 'SHA-256 verification failed' }

3. Install the verified archive into the DSH Web profile.

dsh plugin --profile web add ./dsh-scifork-0.0.3.tgz

4. Start DSH from the directory you want to use as the Research Project.

dsh --profile web

If DSH was already running, restart it after installation. To uninstall the plugin later, run:

dsh plugin --profile web remove dsh-scifork

First use

Use a directory that is either outside another Git repository or is itself a Git repository root. In DSH Chat, initialize the current directory once:

/research init

SciFork creates the project files, initializes a local Git repository when the directory does not already have one, and records a baseline checkpoint. Then click Research Graph in the DSH sidebar to open the companion.

A typical research flow is:

1. Describe the open biomedical question in DSH Chat. SciFork records it as a Research Question rather than treating it as an established claim.
2. Ask DSH to retrieve relevant literature, then import supported assertions into the project. The bundled PubMed Skill can search by PubMed query and look up a PMID or DOI.
3. Open Research Graph to inspect the question, evidence, hypotheses, results, findings, and their relationships.
4. Select an entity and click Research & Expand when you want one bounded follow-up step. Multi-level exploration starts only when you explicitly ask for a Progressive Research Run in the current DSH Chat.
5. Review machine-reviewed Evidence before accepting it as human-reviewed. Only human-reviewed Evidence or validated Results can support a Finding.
6. Check the project whenever needed:

/research validate

The Graph Companion is for navigation and inspection. Continue asking for research, corrections, or graph changes in DSH Chat.

Data and safety

SciFork is designed for local use on the DSH loopback Web server. Literature, PDFs, model output, and project Markdown are treated as untrusted data, and the Companion does not automatically load remote content. Retrieval output may remain in the current DSH Chat even though SciFork does not store complete abstracts or PDFs in the Research Project.

Before committing or sharing a Research Project, check it for PHI, PII, or controlled-access data. See SECURITY.md for the complete data and network boundaries.

DSH ecosystem and distribution

SciFork follows the public DSH bundle contract: the package exports name and apply(ctx), declares its cordis.patch.yml through package.json#dsh.bundle, and can be installed with the DSH plugin command. DSH recommends adding the official dsh-plugin topic to public plugin repositories for ecosystem discovery.

The independent community directory DSH Plugin Hub scans that topic and may list matching repositories. It is not operated by or endorsed by DeepSeek AI. The released v0.0.1 tag remains tarball-only; v0.0.2 and later support both a GitHub source build and the checksum-backed GitHub Release tarball. SciFork is not published to npm.

License

SciFork is available under the MIT License. Research Project data may have separate ownership and sharing terms.