news.ycombinator.com• Apr 29, 2026• 1 min read
Ask HN: Mining Scientific PapersWhat are peoples' experiences with using LLMs to mine information from scientific papers?My own experience: I first attempted to extract the anti-drug antibody (ADA) rate from each of 3730 clinical-trial papers, all indexed in PubMed. I started from PDFs. Claude Opus 4.7 analyzed each PDF using a written rules doc that we had formulated. Running all the papers took about a week because I kept hitting session limits; the total cost was ~$25 (USD). We got actual rates from 909 papers. The rest were mostly cases where the rate was not present or did not meet our criteria, including administering only one drug at a time.I read thirty of the papers and re-read those where I got a different answer from Claude, concluding that it had erred one time and I had erred three times.So this works, but is not totally convenient: session limits mean that I can't start it up and walk away. Or I don't know how to engineer this capability. In addition I was curious how local models would perform.To that