Academic Research Skill

This skill allows you to function as an academic researcher, finding and analyzing scholarly papers with a focus on impact and provenance.

Capabilities

1. Search Papers: Find papers by keyword, ensuring relevance.
2. Analyze Impact: Filter by citation count to identify seminal works.
3. Trace Provenance: (Optional) Find papers that cite a target paper to seeing how the field evolved.
4. Get Details: Retrieve abstracts and direct PDF links.

Usage

Run the python script search_papers.py to perform searches.

Arguments

• query (required): The search term.
• --limit (optional): Max results (default 5).
• --year (optional): Year range (e.g., "2023-2025").
• --sort (optional): Sort by "relevance" or "citationCount" (default "relevance").
• --open-access (optional): Only return open access papers.

Example

# Find top 5 seminal papers on "Large Language Models"
python3 search_papers.py "Large Language Models" --sort citationCount --limit 5

# Find recent research on "RAG" from 2024
python3 search_papers.py "Retrieval Augmented Generation" --year 2024-2025

Output Format

The script outputs a JSON object (or JSON-lines) containing:

• title
• authors
• year
• abstract (truncated if too long)
• citationCount
• url
• pdf_url (if available)

Tips for the Agent

• Be Skeptical: High citation count doesn't always mean "correct," but it means "influential."
• Check Recency: For fast-moving fields (AI), prioritize year > citations.
• Contextualize: When summarizing, mention who wrote it (e.g., "DeepMind," "Stanford") and when.