{
  "abstract": "Experimental materials-science labs routinely accumulate synthesis and characterization data across spreadsheets, instrument export files, and ad-hoc folders, with no durable link between a sample's recipe, its measured properties, and whether a similar composition has been reported elsewhere. We present Stage 1 of an open-source data infrastructure closing this loop for a single working alloy-synthesis lab: a relational schema for composition and synthesis records, a strict composition/mass calculator, three empirical alloy-design screening metrics (VEC, atomic-size mismatch, mixing enthalpy) plus a melt/boil-point synthesis-feasibility check, an automated cross-referencing layer against three public materials databases (Materials Project, OQMD, Alexandria) with deduplication and adjustable relevance filtering, and a desktop GUI unifying the workflow behind a single \"new entry\" action. Built and used by a practicing researcher rather than a software team, we report it as a systems/methodology contribution - the architecture, the concrete engineering failures encountered while building it, and how each was diagnosed and fixed - rather than new materials-science results. We argue the specific defects found - a parser ambiguity that produced silent wrong answers, a partial code edit that broke a dependency chain invisibly, a database-metadata bug traceable to an un-cast numeric type, and a credential-hygiene gap that .gitignore alone did not close - generalize to any small scientific-software project built by a domain expert without formal software-engineering training. Both the system and the lessons from building it are reported here; two follow-on papers cover the validated characterization pipelines (Stage 2) and the retrieval-augmented synthesis advisor and CALPHAD thermodynamics module (Stage 3) built on this foundation.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": "2610.28647",
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Iliya Angelov Radulov"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/b08hms81a0say.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2610.28647",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "b08hms81a0say",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28647",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": "CC0-1.0",
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "arxiv",
      "cond-mat.mtrl-sci"
    ],
    [
      "arxiv",
      "cs.DL"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "2505|Machine Learning in Materials Science"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7223204043",
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.28647",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-04",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/b08hms81a0say.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:34:18Z",
      "native_id": "2610.28647",
      "source": "arxiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28647"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "physics",
      "origin": "arxiv:cond-mat.mtrl-sci",
      "subfield": "condensed-matter"
    }
  ],
  "title": "An Open-Source Data Infrastructure for Alloy Synthesis Research: Stage 1 --- Composition Screening and Literature Cross-Referencing",
  "title_text": "An Open-Source Data Infrastructure for Alloy Synthesis Research: Stage 1 --- Composition Screening and Literature Cross-Referencing",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:34:18Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/b08hms81a0say",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "versions": []
}