semantic-scholar

Semantic Scholar Lookup

Fast, targeted lookups of paper metadata, citations, and authors using the Semantic Scholar API via `asta papers` commands.

When to Use This Skill

• User asks for details about a specific paper (by title, DOI, arXiv ID, etc.)
• User wants to see papers citing a given work
• User asks about an author's papers
• User wants a quick keyword search (not a comprehensive report)
• User wants to find specific claims, methods, or evidence within paper full text (use snippet-search)
• Task requires targeted paper metadata or citation graphs

Not for comprehensive reports - use the Literature Report Generation skill for that.

Related: Find Literature skill

asta papers ... (this skill) is for mechanical, targeted lookups against the Semantic Scholar API: fetch a known paper, list citations, search by keyword across titles / abstracts / bodies, look up an author. There is no agent-mediated reasoning beyond S2's own keyword ranking.

The Find Literature skill (asta literature find / asta literature interactive) is for topic-driven, criterion-based search, where the system extracts relevance criteria from the query, retrieves candidates, and ranks them against those criteria with per-paper relevance summaries — closer to "literature search as a graded judgement" than to a keyword match.

Use this skill (asta papers) when:

• The user names a specific paper, author, ID, or exact phrase to look up
• You need raw metadata (citations, venue, fields of study, openAccessInfo)
• You're navigating a citation graph (who cites what, who an author has cited)
• You want to grep for a specific string in paper bodies (snippet-search)
• You need a fast result and exhaustive coverage isn't required

Use the Find Literature skill instead when:

• The user asks "find papers on X", "what does the literature say about Y", "papers that argue Z"
• The query is a research topic, not a string match — and ranked relevance with explanations matters
• The work session is exploratory: filtering prior results, aggregating, following relations across multiple turns (use asta literature interactive --thread-dir <dir>)
• A find-style one-shot or interactive-style multi-turn agent loop with verification will produce a better-ranked result than raw keyword search

The two are complementary. A common flow: use Find Literature to discover relevant papers on a topic, then asta papers get / asta papers citations to drill into specific ones.

Session-level rule of thumb: if the session as a whole is about literature search/exploration (e.g. the first user turn is "find papers on X"), default to asta literature interactive for the discovery work, even when individual queries look simple. Reach for asta papers when the session is about something else and a quick metadata or citation lookup is just one step inside it.

Available Commands

Get Paper Details

asta papers get - Get metadata for a single paper by ID

asta papers get ARXIV:2005.14165

asta papers get "DOI:10.18653/v1/N18-3011" --fields title,year,authors,abstract

asta papers get CorpusId:215416146 --format text

Supported ID formats:

• ARXIV:2106.15928
• DOI:10.18653/v1/N18-3011
• CorpusId:215416146
• PMID:19872477
• URL:https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15928

Common fields: title,abstract,authors,year,venue,citationCount,publicationDate,url,isOpenAccess,fieldsOfStudy

Search Papers

asta papers search - Keyword-based paper search

asta papers search "transformers attention mechanism"

asta papers search "RLHF" --date 2023- --limit 10

asta papers search "neural networks" --fields title,year,abstract,authors

asta papers search "LLM safety" --date 2024-01-01:2024-12-31

Options:

• --fields: Comma-separated fields to return
• --limit: Number of results (default 20, max 100)
• --date: Publication date or year filter. Accepts years (2020, 2020-2024, 2020-) or date ranges (2024-01-01:2024-12-31). Maps to the S2 publicationDateOrYear parameter.
• --format: Output as json or text

Snippet Search

asta papers snippet-search - Search over paper full text (title, abstract, and body) via the S2 snippet/search API. Returns matching text excerpts alongside paper metadata.

asta papers snippet-search "in-context learning emerges at scale"

asta papers snippet-search "RLHF reward hacking" --date 2023- --limit 10

asta papers snippet-search "sparse mixture of experts" --fields snippet.text,snippet.snippetKind,snippet.section

# Pin results to papers indexed before a date (useful for reproducible benchmarks)
asta papers snippet-search "chain-of-thought" --inserted-before 2024-01-01

The --fields option accepts snippet fields:

• snippet.text - The matched text excerpt (~500 words)
• snippet.snippetKind - Source type (e.g., title, abstract, body)
• snippet.section - Paper section the snippet came from
• snippet.snippetOffset - Character position data (start, end)
• snippet.annotations - Markup including reference mentions and sentence boundaries

If --fields is omitted, the default is snippet.text,snippet.snippetKind. Paper metadata (corpusId, title, authors, openAccessInfo) and relevance score are always returned regardless of --fields.

Options:

• --fields: Comma-separated snippet fields to return
• --date: Date/year filter, same as standard search
• --limit: Max results (default 20, max 1000 — higher ceiling than standard search)
• --inserted-before: Only include papers indexed before this date (YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY-MM, or YYYY). Typically used for consistency in benchmarking — pinning a cutoff date ensures the same set of papers is returned across repeated runs, even as new papers are continuously indexed.
• --format: Output as json or text

Get Citations

asta papers citations - Papers that cite a given work

asta papers citations ARXIV:2005.14165

asta papers citations CorpusId:218487638 --limit 20 --format text

Options:

• --fields: Fields for citing papers
• --limit: Max results (default 50, max 1000)
• --format: Output as json or text

Author Search and Papers

asta papers author search - Find authors by name

asta papers author search "Yoav Goldberg"

asta papers author search "Hinton" --limit 5 --format text

asta papers author papers - Get papers by an author

# First, get author ID from search
asta papers author search "Yoav Goldberg"

# Then get their papers using the author ID
asta papers author papers 1741101 --limit 50

asta papers author papers 1741101 --fields title,year,venue,citationCount

Options:

• --fields: Fields to return for papers
• --limit: Max results (default 50, max 1000)
• --format: Output as json or text

Output Formats

All commands support two output formats:

JSON format (default):

• Machine-readable
• Complete data structure
• Pipe to jq for filtering
• Best for programmatic use

Text format (--format text):

• Human-readable
• Formatted output
• Best for quick browsing
• Use when showing results to user

Usage Tips

Efficient Field Selection

Only request fields you need for faster responses:

# Good - minimal fields for quick browse
asta papers search "deep learning" --fields title,year,authors,citationCount

# Less efficient - many fields slow down response
asta papers search "deep learning" --fields title,abstract,authors,year,venue,citations,references

Date Filtering

Restrict to recent papers when appropriate:

asta papers search "RLHF" --date 2023-2024  # 2023-2024
asta papers search "RLHF" --date 2023-      # 2023 onwards
asta papers search "RLHF" --date -2020      # Before 2020
asta papers search "RLHF" --date 2024-06-01:2024-12-31  # Specific date range

Piping to jq

For complex JSON processing:

# Extract just titles
asta papers search "transformers" | jq '.data[].title'

# Filter by citation count
asta papers search "neural networks" | jq '.data[] | select(.citationCount > 100)'

# Get author names
asta papers get ARXIV:2005.14165 | jq '.authors[].name'

Multi-Step Workflows

Chain commands for complex queries:

Example 1: Find highly-cited recent papers by an author

# 1. Find author
asta papers author search "Geoffrey Hinton" --format text

# 2. Get their recent papers
asta papers author papers 1751273 --fields title,year,citationCount --limit 50 | \
  jq '.data[].paper | select(.year >= 2020) | select(.citationCount > 100)'

Example 2: Explore citation network

# 1. Get paper details
asta papers get ARXIV:2005.14165

# 2. Get who cited it
asta papers citations ARXIV:2005.14165 --limit 20 --format text

# 3. Get details on specific citing papers
asta papers get CorpusId:123456789

Example Workflows

"Get details for arXiv:2005.14165"

asta papers get ARXIV:2005.14165 --format text

Present the output to user in a readable format.

"What papers cite the GPT-3 paper?"

# GPT-3 paper
asta papers citations ARXIV:2005.14165 --limit 50 --format text

Show recent/highly-cited papers from the results.

"Recent papers on RLHF"

asta papers search "RLHF reinforcement learning from human feedback" \
  --date 2023- \
  --limit 20 \
  --fields title,abstract,year,authors,venue,citationCount \
  --format text

"Papers by Yoav Goldberg"

# Step 1: Find author
asta papers author search "Yoav Goldberg" --format text

# Step 2: Get their papers (using author ID from step 1)
asta papers author papers 1741101 \
  --fields title,year,venue,citationCount \
  --limit 50 \
  --format text

"Find evidence of 'chain-of-thought' reasoning"

# Snippet search finds mentions in paper bodies, not just titles/abstracts
asta papers snippet-search "chain-of-thought reasoning improves performance" \
  --limit 15

# Or use standard search for paper-level results
asta papers search "chain-of-thought reasoning" \
  --fields title,abstract,year,authors \
  --limit 15

# Then examine specific papers with 'asta papers get'

Response Presentation

When showing results to users:

For single paper:

**Title** (Year)
Authors: [author list]
Venue: [venue name]
Citations: [count]

[Abstract]

URL: [Semantic Scholar link]

For paper lists:

Found [N] papers:

1. **Paper Title** - Author et al. (Year) - [Venue] - [X citations]
2. **Another Paper** - ...
...

For snippet results (snippet-search):

Found [N] snippet results:

1. **Paper Title** - Author et al.
   Score: 0.95
   Snippet (abstract): "...matching text excerpt..."
2. **Another Paper** - ...
...

For citations:

Found [N] papers citing this work:

Recent citations:
1. [Paper 1] (2024) - [citations]
2. [Paper 2] (2023) - [citations]
...

Best Practices

• Use --format text when showing results directly to user
• Use JSON output when you need to process or filter results
• Start with small limits, increase if needed
• Only fetch fields you'll actually use
• Use snippet-search when searching for specific claims, methods, or evidence within paper bodies
• Use search for topic-level paper discovery
• For comprehensive research, suggest Literature Report Generation skill instead
• Provide Semantic Scholar URLs when helpful (https://semanticscholar.org/paper/{paperId})

API Key

The commands use the ASTA_TOOL_KEY environment variable if available. Most queries work without a key, but a key provides higher rate limits.