| name | semantic-scholar |
| description | Search academic papers and journals. Returns paper text — full text when available via GROBID, otherwise abstracts. Use for scholarly literature, not general web content. |
| args | {"query":"required string — search terms (e.g. \"constitutional AI\", \"BERT pretraining\")","limit":"optional int (default 10) — maximum results"} |
semantic-scholar
Search the Semantic Scholar academic corpus. Returns paper text concatenated into a single observation: full paper text via GROBID extraction when the PDF is available, otherwise the abstract only.
When to use vs search-web
semantic-scholar — scholarly literature, peer-reviewed work, papers, citations.search-web — current events, general web content, anything that isn't academic.
For a comprehensive search across both, do both — they cover different corpora.
Examples
{"thought": "find recent constitutional AI papers", "tool": "semantic-scholar", "query": "constitutional AI alignment"}
{"thought": "load BERT-architecture papers, just the top three", "tool": "semantic-scholar", "query": "BERT bidirectional transformer pretraining", "limit": 3}
Notes
- Free public API; no key required for basic search.
- Full-text extraction requires a local GROBID instance. Without GROBID, results fall back to abstracts.
