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.

Installation

This skill requires the asta CLI:

# Install/reinstall at the correct version
PLUGIN_VERSION=0.16.0
if [ "$(asta --version 2>/dev/null | grep -oE '[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+')" != "$PLUGIN_VERSION" ]; then
  uv tool install --force git+https://github.com/allenai/asta-plugins.git@v$PLUGIN_VERSION
fi

Prerequisites: Python 3.11+ and uv package manager

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.