| name | academic-research |
| description | A tool for rigorous academic research using Semantic Scholar and ArXiv. Focuses on finding highly-cited papers, retrieving abstracts, and following citation trails to understand the provenance of ideas. |
Academic Research Skill
This skill allows you to function as an academic researcher, finding and analyzing scholarly papers with a focus on impact and provenance.
Capabilities
- Search Papers: Find papers by keyword, ensuring relevance.
- Analyze Impact: Filter by citation count to identify seminal works.
- Trace Provenance: (Optional) Find papers that cite a target paper to seeing how the field evolved.
- Get Details: Retrieve abstracts and direct PDF links.
- Velocity Metrics: See citations per year to identify "trending" papers.
- BibTeX Export: Generate citations for your references.
Usage
Run the python script search_papers.py to perform searches.
Arguments
query (required): The search term.
--limit (optional): Max results (default 5).
--year (optional): Year range (e.g., "2023-2025").
--sort (optional): Sort by "relevance", "citationCount", or "velocity" (new!).
--open-access (optional): Only return open access papers.
--format (optional): Output "json" (default) or "bibtex".
Example
python3 search_papers.py "Large Language Models" --sort velocity
python3 search_papers.py "Attention is All You Need" --format bibtex
Output Format
The script outputs a JSON object (or JSON-lines) containing:
title
authors
year
citationCount
citationsPerYear: Velocity metric.
tldr: Semantic Scholar's generated summary (if available).
url
pdf_url (if available)
Tips for the Agent
- TLDR vs Abstract: The
tldr field is often shorter and easier to digest for quick summaries.
- Velocity: A paper from 2024 with 100 citations is often more relevant than a 2010 paper with 500 citations. Use sort="velocity".