semanticscholar-skill — the easiest way to search the scientific literature 📚

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External references: Semantic Scholar API Tutorial · API Docs · Request API Key

A skill that turns the Semantic Scholar academic graph (200M+ papers across arXiv + bioRxiv + PubMed + journals + conferences) into a single-script, rate-limited, agent-friendly toolkit.

• Search by keyword, boolean expression, full-text snippet, exact title, or author
• Traverse forward / backward citations and find similar or recommended papers
• Filter by year, venue, fields of study, min citations, open access, pub types
• Export to BibTeX, Markdown, or JSON
• Built-in correctness — automatic rate limiting, exponential backoff, single-script execution

Works with Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, OpenClaw, ClawHub, and SkillsMP — any agent that supports the Agent Skills format.

🔄 How it works

The skill picks the right endpoint for the user's intent (keyword search, citation traversal, recommendations, author lookup), runs the call through the rate-limited s2.py helper with exponential backoff, applies filters (year / venue / fields of study / min citations / open access), and returns results ready to export to BibTeX, Markdown, or JSON.

Documentation

Doc	What's inside
docs/features.md	Why Semantic Scholar, full feature list, comparison vs. arXiv / bioRxiv / asta-skill / native agents
docs/api-reference.md	s2.py helper module API, usage examples
docs/limitations.md	Prerequisites, API key setup, known limitations
docs/tutorial.md	End-to-end tutorial
skills/semanticscholar-skill/SKILL.md	Workflow guide loaded by the agent

Quick Start

# Recommended — set an API key for a dedicated quota
export S2_API_KEY=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

# Install dependencies
pip install requests

Install the skill:

# Any agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.)
npx skills add Agents365-ai/365-skills -g

# Claude Code only
> /plugin marketplace add Agents365-ai/365-skills
> /plugin install semanticscholar

Also published on SkillsMP and ClawHub — each handles updates through its own marketplace.

Usage

Just describe what you want:

> Use semanticscholar-skill to search for recent mixture-of-experts papers at NeurIPS since 2023

> Find papers citing "Attention Is All You Need" and rank by citation count

> Recommend papers similar to DOI:10.1038/nature14539, excluding NLP

> Export the top 10 results to BibTeX

See docs/api-reference.md for more examples and the helper module reference.

🔗 Related Skills

Part of the Agents365-ai research-skill family — pick the right tool for the job:

Skill	Niche	When to use
asta-skill	Same corpus via Ai2 Asta MCP	When your host supports MCP and you have an Asta API key
paper-fetch	DOI → PDF, 7-source fallback	When you already have IDs and need the actual full text
scholar-deep-research	8-phase literature review pipeline	When the user wants a structured cited report, not just search results
zotero-research-assistant	Zotero library workflows	When the user manages references in Zotero

❤️ Support

If this skill helps you, consider supporting the author:

👤 Author

Agents365-ai

• GitHub: https://github.com/Agents365-ai
• Bilibili: https://space.bilibili.com/441831884

📄 License

MIT