semantic-scholar-search

Semantic Scholar Search

Search 200M+ papers with rich metadata. No API key required (100 req/sec).

Two modes:

1. Search — find papers by query
2. Detail — get deep info on a specific paper (references, citations)

Usage

SCRIPT=$(find ~/.claude/plugins -path "*/ai-frontier/skills/semantic-scholar-search/scripts/search.mjs" 2>/dev/null | head -1)

# Search mode
node "$SCRIPT" "your query" [maxResults] [--year=2024] [--open-access]

# Detail mode (get paper + citations + references)
node "$SCRIPT" --detail=<s2PaperId|DOI|ArXiv:id>

Arguments

Arg	Default	Description
query	(required)	Natural language search query
maxResults	10	Number of results (1-100)
--year=YYYY	none	Only papers from YYYY onward
--open-access	false	Only papers with free PDF
--detail=ID	n/a	Get full details for a specific paper

When to Use

• Finding papers with citation context (how influential, who cites it)
• Getting AI-generated TLDRs for quick understanding
• Tracing citation chains (what a paper builds on, what builds on it)
• Filtering by year to find recent work
• Finding open access PDFs for deeper reading

Key Fields

• results[].tldr — AI-generated one-sentence summary (from S2)
• results[].citations — total citation count
• results[].source_specific.influential_citations — citations from influential papers
• results[].source_specific.fields_of_study — e.g., ["Computer Science", "Mathematics"]
• Detail mode: paper.top_references and paper.recent_citations for citation graph

Examples

# Find influential papers on RLHF
node "$SCRIPT" "reinforcement learning from human feedback" 10

# Recent papers only (2025+)
node "$SCRIPT" "mixture of experts scaling" 15 --year=2025

# Get details + citation graph for a specific paper
node "$SCRIPT" --detail=ArXiv:2210.11416