Radiowriter

Radiowriter searches PubMed, helps you screen the results, and gives you an editor for writing a Radiopaedia.org article from them.

You can type a PubMed query on one line or build it in blocks, one per concept. Results can be sorted by citation count or by journal rank (SJR), filtered, and saved in reading lists. The editor inserts the section structure Radiopaedia recommends for the type of article, numbers the citations at export, runs Radiopaedia's linter rules on the draft, and produces the HTML their editor accepts.

It runs on macOS, Linux and Windows. The archive is stored on your computer. The only network requests are the searches and the lookups listed in The services it calls.

Unofficial. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Radiopaedia.org.

Install

Radiowriter is a Python program that serves a page to your own browser. The commands are the same on macOS, Linux and Windows.

Install it:

uv tool install radiowriter

Run it:

radiowriter

It opens http://localhost:8501 in your browser. Ctrl+C in the terminal stops it. uv tool upgrade radiowriter updates it. uv tool uninstall radiowriter removes the program and leaves your archive in place.

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 install the current state of the main branch in place of the last release, use uv tool install git+https://github.com/gmadevs/Radiowriter. See How releasing works.

First run

The first screen asks for an email address. PubMed and Unpaywall require a contact address in every request, and use it to reach you if your requests cause a problem. You do not have to register anywhere, and the address is stored only on your computer.

Three other settings are optional and can be added later:

• an NCBI API key, which raises the rate limit from 3 to 10 requests a second;
• a Semantic Scholar key, which makes citation lookups faster;
• your library's LibKey ID, which gives direct full-text links through your library's subscription.

Journal quartiles

Quartiles need no setup. A copy of the SCImago table for 2025 is included, and articles are matched to it by ISSN.

To use a newer year, click Download data (top right of the table) on scimagojr.com and put the CSV in the folder that radiowriter --where prints. A file whose name starts with scimagojr is used in place of the included copy. Then open 📊 Journal metrics in the sidebar and click ↻ Reload the file and re-match.

The included copy is SCImago's data, used under CC BY-NC. It has been reduced to the 10 columns the app reads and to the rows of type "journal". radiowriter/data/scimagojr-2025.about.txt records the source, the download date and what was removed.

These metrics are not the Journal Impact Factor. The Impact Factor is published by Clarivate in the JCR. SCImago gives SJR, which weights citations by the rank of the citing journal, and cites/doc (2y), which is calculated like an impact factor but on Scopus data. The app shows both, each with its label.

What it does

Search

Type PubMed syntax on one line, or use the block builder. A block holds one concept. The terms inside a block are joined by OR, and the blocks are joined by AND.

The filter control sends PubMed's filters with the query: publication date, text availability, 66 article types, 58 languages, 14 age groups, species and sex. The ISSG published search filters for guidelines and evidence syntheses are included.

📰 Fetch recent literature fetches the recent reviews and guidelines from the journals of a Radiopaedia editorial group. CNS is the only group for now.

A generator turns the section headings of a Radiopaedia article into search strategies. For example, Epidemiology becomes terms for prevalence and incidence, and MRI becomes the MeSH terms and text words for magnetic resonance.

Search terms for 43 imaging modalities are included. Doppler ultrasound, for example, adds the MeSH descriptors, doppler, duplex, both spellings of "colour", and the resistive index.

Screen

The archive can be filtered by read, flagged, reading list and journal quartile, and sorted by citations or by SJR. Full text opens through LibKey if your library subscribes, or through Unpaywall if a legal free copy exists.

You can create, rename and delete reading lists, and an article can be in several lists. An article can be deleted from its card, and several can be selected and deleted together. Articles marked read are deleted from the archive at the next start, except those in a list or with a PDF in the library.

Keep the PDFs

The library holds one PDF per article, named Author Year - Journal - Title [PMID n].pdf. Free copies are downloaded directly. A PDF you downloaded yourself, for example through LibKey, can be dropped into the app, which finds its article by DOI or title in the archive or on PubMed. Highlights made in the app's reader are listed with a checkbox each.

Write

The Markdown editor includes the 23 section structures Radiopaedia recommends and inserts the one for your type of article.

Cite with the PubMed identifier, [@27859258]. At export the citations are numbered in order of first appearance.

Radiopaedia's linter rules run on the draft. Two buttons copy the article and the reference list as rich text, so that headings, bold and the <sup> markers are kept when you paste into Radiopaedia's editor.

The study window shows the Radiopaedia page you are editing next to a PDF and its highlights.

Where your data is stored

The archive is one SQLite file in the user data folder of your system:

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

radiowriter --where prints the folder. To use another folder, for example on an external disk, set RADIOWRITER_HOME:

RADIOWRITER_HOME=/some/path radiowriter

⇅ Export and backup in the sidebar writes one of two files:

• a .nbib file with the articles, in PubMed's format, which reference managers can import;
• a .json file with the whole archive, for moving it to another computer.

The .json file does not contain your settings, so a backup you share does not include your email address or your keys.

Running from source

git clone https://github.com/gmadevs/Radiowriter.git
cd Radiowriter
python3 -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .
radiowriter

The tests need no network and no configuration:

python3 check_rules.py       # the Radiopaedia linter rules
python3 check_structure.py   # the article structures
python3 check_search.py      # query building, ISSG filters, strategies, lists
python3 check_journals.py    # SCImago, journal matching, Unpaywall, backups
python3 check_library.py     # PDF library, highlights, the Radiopaedia list
python3 check_bench.py       # the Screening page and its local server
python3 check_app.py         # the interface, driven without a browser

check_mesh_live.py needs the network. It asks PubMed whether every MeSH term used by the strategies still exists. Run it when you change the strategies, and each January, when MeSH is updated.

Documentation

The full documentation is at gmadevs.github.io/Radiowriter.

Install and first run	Installation, settings, the SCImago file
Search PubMed · in blocks	The filters, and building a query one concept at a time
Screen · journals	Reading lists, quartiles, open access
PDFs and the study window	The PDF library, highlights, Radiopaedia next to a PDF
Write	Structures, citations, the linter
Backup	Moving to another computer
How it works	Architecture, storage, the services it calls
Known limitations	What the app does not do

Licence

AGPL-3.0-only.

The Radiopaedia article structures in radiowriter/data/article-structure.json and the linter rules in radiowriter/data/lint-rules.json are transcriptions of Radiopaedia's published guidance.

radiowriter/data/scimagojr-2025.csv.gz contains journal metrics from SCImago Journal & Country Rank, derived from Elsevier's Scopus and used under CC BY-NC 4.0. The file is redistributed with only the columns the app reads. The values are SCImago's and are unmodified. The .about.txt file next to it records the download date and what was removed. The NonCommercial term applies to that file, whatever licence terms you follow for the rest of the code.