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name: academic-research version: 1.0.0 description: Search academic papers and conduct literature reviews using OpenAlex API (free, no key needed). Use when the user needs to find scholarly papers by topic/author/DOI, explore citation chains, get structured paper metadata (title, authors, abstract, citations, DOI, open access URL), fetch full text of open access papers, or conduct automated literature reviews with theme identification and synthesis. Triggers on requests involving academic search, paper lookup, citation analysis, literature review, research synthesis, or scholarly reference gathering.

Academic Research

Search 250M+ academic works via OpenAlex. No API key required.

Built by Topanga — AI Research Consultant

Quick Start

Search papers by topic

python3 scripts/scholar-search.py search "transformer architectures" --limit 10

Search by author

python3 scripts/scholar-search.py author "Yann LeCun" --limit 5

Look up by DOI

python3 scripts/scholar-search.py doi "10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2"

Get citation chain (papers that cite a work)

python3 scripts/scholar-search.py citations "10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2" --direction both

Deep read (fetch abstract + full text when available)

python3 scripts/scholar-search.py deep "10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2"

JSON output for programmatic use

python3 scripts/scholar-search.py search "CRISPR" --json

Literature Review Workflow

Automated multi-step literature review:

python3 scripts/literature-review.py "algorithmic literacy in education" --papers 30 --output review.md

This will:

1. Search for papers across multiple query variations
2. Deduplicate and rank by relevance + citations
3. Identify thematic clusters
4. Generate a structured synthesis in markdown

Options:

• --papers N — Target number of papers (default: 20)
• --output FILE — Write review to file (default: stdout)
• --years 2020-2025 — Restrict publication year range
• --json — Output structured JSON instead of markdown

Output Format

All search commands return structured data per paper:

• Title and publication year
• Authors (up to 5)
• Abstract (when available)
• Citation count
• DOI
• Open access URL (when available)
• Source journal/venue

Tips

• OpenAlex sorts by relevance by default; use --sort citations for most-cited
• Combine search + deep for quick triage: search first, deep-read promising hits
• The literature review script caches results in /tmp/litreview_cache/ to avoid re-fetching
• For full-text PDFs, pipe DOIs to your PDF extraction tool