Pp Thelancet

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The Lancet — Printing Press CLI

Prerequisites: Install the CLI

This skill drives the thelancet-pp-cli binary. You must verify the CLI is installed before invoking any command from this skill. If it is missing, install it first:

1. Install via the Printing Press installer. It defaults binaries to $HOME/.local/bin on macOS/Linux and %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\PrintingPress\bin on Windows:

   npx -y @mvanhorn/printing-press-library install thelancet --cli-only

2. Verify: thelancet-pp-cli --version
3. Ensure the reported install directory is on $PATH for the agent/runtime that will invoke this skill.

If the npx install fails (no Node, offline, etc.), fall back to a direct Go install (requires Go 1.26.4 or newer). This installs into $GOPATH/bin (default $HOME/go/bin), so add that directory to $PATH instead:

go install github.com/mvanhorn/printing-press-library/library/other/thelancet/cmd/thelancet-pp-cli@latest

If --version reports "command not found" after install, the runtime cannot see the binary directory on $PATH. Do not proceed with skill commands until verification succeeds.

The Lancet CLI gives researchers and institutions offline access to The Lancet family of journals via OpenAlex. Beyond search and fetch, it ranks researchers by citation impact within a specialty (rank-authors), maps institutional co-authorship networks (mesh), tracks which institutions are publishing more over time (affiliation-growth), and detects how a journal's editorial focus shifts (drift) — insights impossible from single API queries or paywalled tools.

When to Use This CLI

Use this CLI to answer questions about The Lancet's research landscape offline and without API throttling: literature reviews, tracking institutional publication trends, finding collaborators, and analyzing how medical research evolves over time.

Anti-triggers

Do not use this CLI for:

• Do NOT use this CLI for real-time article feeds or breaking news; it syncs periodically from OpenAlex, not continuously
• Do NOT use this for journal submission or peer-review status; it mirrors published works, not the editorial pipeline
• Do NOT use this for full-text access to paywalled articles; it returns metadata, topics, and links only

Unique Capabilities

These capabilities aren't available in any other tool for this API.

Local data compounds

• rank-authors — Rank researchers at your institution by citation impact within a specific Lancet journal or topic.

  Grant managers and department heads use this to identify who is leading at your institution in a specific field; agents can use it to find high-impact collaborators.

  thelancet-pp-cli rank-authors --institution 'Harvard' --journal lancet-oncology --json

• mesh — Find researchers at your institution who co-author Lancet papers and quantify how their work connects.

  Librarians and research directors use this to uncover collaboration opportunities and map how an institution's researchers connect through Lancet.

  thelancet-pp-cli mesh --org 'Stanford University' --json

• affiliation-growth — Track institutions gaining publication velocity in Lancet journals; identify rising research centers.

  Strategy teams track this to understand competitive research landscapes and identify emerging partner institutions.

  thelancet-pp-cli affiliation-growth --journal lancet-neurology --years 5 --json

• visibility-gap — Find authors whose citation impact is out of step with the prestige of the Lancet journals they publish in.

  Grant managers and research directors use this to identify under-recognized talent for promotion or collaboration.

  thelancet-pp-cli visibility-gap --institution 'Oxford' --json

Offline analysis

• drift — Compare how a journal's topic distribution shifts between two time windows; spot emerging and fading specialties.

  Research strategists use this to align their work with journal editorial priorities and detect when journal scope shifts.

  thelancet-pp-cli drift --journal lancet-oncology --window1 2018:2020 --window2 2023:2024 --json

• curate — Auto-generate ranked reading lists for a topic, sorted by citations, date, per-year (average citations per year since publication; age = years since pub_date, or July 1 of the year if unknown, at least 0.25) or velocity (recency-weighted mean of citations in the last up to 3 complete calendar years, weights 0.5/0.3/0.2; needs a refreshed store); per-year and velocity use the local store only, exportable as Markdown or BibTeX. Works whose yearly counts were never fetched (counts_synced_at is NULL) have no velocity and rank last; --sort velocity prints one stderr line with how many matched works lack counts and fails with a refresh hint when none have them.

  Librarians and researchers use this to quickly assemble authoritative reading lists without manual screening.

  thelancet-pp-cli curate --topic 'gene therapy' --sort citations --output bibtex

Command Reference

authors — Search and retrieve authors

• thelancet-pp-cli authors get — Get a single author by OpenAlex ID
• thelancet-pp-cli authors search — Search authors

sources — Journal (source) metadata

• thelancet-pp-cli sources <id> — Get a journal (source) by ISSN or OpenAlex ID

works — Search and retrieve Lancet articles

• thelancet-pp-cli works get — Get a single article by OpenAlex ID or DOI
• thelancet-pp-cli works search — Search Lancet articles (works)

Finding the right command

When you know what you want to do but not which command does it, ask the CLI directly:

thelancet-pp-cli which "<capability in your own words>"

which resolves a natural-language capability query to the best matching command from this CLI's curated feature index. Exit code 0 means at least one match; exit code 2 means no confident match — fall back to --help or use a narrower query.

Recipes

Build a topic reading list for a literature review

thelancet-pp-cli curate --topic 'machine learning diagnosis' --sort citations --output bibtex > review.bib

Generate a citation-ranked, BibTeX-exportable reading list on a topic across Lancet journals in one command.

Narrow a deeply nested works response for an agent

thelancet-pp-cli works search --search 'immunotherapy' --per-page 10 --agent --select results.title,results.cited_by_count,results.authorships.author.display_name

OpenAlex works are large and deeply nested; pair --agent with dotted --select paths to return only the fields you need and save context.

Spot editorial drift in a specialty journal

thelancet-pp-cli drift --journal lancet-oncology --window1 2018:2020 --window2 2023:2024 --top-n 15

Compare topic distributions across two multi-year windows to see which specialties the journal now publishes more or less of.