Citation Survey Skill

Survey citing or referenced papers using the OpenAlex API.

All paths below are relative to this skill's base directory. Construct the full path by prepending the base directory shown at the top of this skill's context.

Usage

Find papers that cite a given work

uv run <base-dir>/scripts/citation_survey.py citing --doi <DOI>
uv run <base-dir>/scripts/citation_survey.py citing --arxiv <ARXIV_ID>

Find references of a given work

uv run <base-dir>/scripts/citation_survey.py refs --doi <DOI>

Filter results by keywords in title/abstract

uv run <base-dir>/scripts/citation_survey.py citing --doi <DOI> --filter "keyword1,keyword2"

Save results to JSON

uv run <base-dir>/scripts/citation_survey.py citing --doi <DOI> --output results.json

Show abstracts

uv run <base-dir>/scripts/citation_survey.py citing --doi <DOI> --verbose

Options

direction: citing (papers that cite this work) or refs (references of this work)
--doi: DOI of the seed paper
--arxiv: arXiv ID of the seed paper (alternative to --doi)
--filter: Comma-separated keywords to filter by title/abstract
--max-results: Maximum number of results (default: 2000)
--output: Save results to JSON file
--verbose: Show abstracts in output
--api-key: OpenAlex API key (supported, but leaks into shell history/process lists)
--api-key-file: Read OpenAlex API key from a file

Examples

Find papers citing Hackl et al. (2020) about Kähler geometry:

uv run <base-dir>/scripts/citation_survey.py citing --doi 10.21468/SciPostPhys.9.4.048 --filter "variational principle,kähler,neural quantum"

Find references of a paper by arXiv ID:

uv run <base-dir>/scripts/citation_survey.py refs --arxiv 2004.01015

API Key

OpenAlex API requires an API key (free account at https://openalex.org/settings/api). Prefer OPENALEX_API_KEY or --api-key-file. --api-key is still supported, but command-line secrets may be visible in shell history or process listings. The script works without a key but with stricter rate limits.

Notes

Uses OpenAlex API (free tier available)
Rate limiting: 0.15s delay between paginated requests
Network, timeout, and HTTP errors are reported as short user-facing messages instead of Python tracebacks
Abstract reconstruction from inverted index (OpenAlex format)
For arXiv-only papers, DOI resolution may fail; use --arxiv instead

citation-survey