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