paper-search

Search and rank scientific papers and GitHub repositories from the command line.

Queries OpenAlex (250M+ works), Semantic Scholar (215M+ papers), and Unpaywall in parallel, merges results by DOI, and outputs ranked papers with citation counts, TLDRs, and PDF links. Search GitHub for related code repositories. Export as BibTeX or JSON, save to .claude/papers.md for project context, or open PDFs directly in the browser.

Installation

uv tool install paper-search

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/Csed-dev/paper-search.git
cd paper-search
uv sync

Quick Start

# Search papers by topic, ranked by citations
paper-search papers "large language models" -n 10

# Filter by year or year range
paper-search papers "vision transformers" --year 2022-2024 --sort date

# Find similar papers (accepts DOI, arXiv ID, or Semantic Scholar ID)
paper-search recommend 1706.03762 -n 10

# Search GitHub repositories
paper-search repos "transformer attention" --language python --min-stars 100

# Export as BibTeX
paper-search papers "reinforcement learning" -n 5 --bibtex -o refs.bib

# Export as JSON for scripting
paper-search papers "graph neural networks" --json | jq '.[].title'

# Save results to .claude/papers.md in current project
paper-search papers "federated learning" --save

# Open a paper's PDF in the browser
paper-search open 1706.03762

Example Output

$ paper-search papers "attention mechanism" -n 3

  Results for: attention mechanism
  3 papers, sorted by citations

    1. Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks (2016) [52848 citations] (9606 influential) [OA]
       Shaoqing Ren, Kaiming He, Ross Girshick, Jian Sun
       DOI: 10.1109/tpami.2016.2577031
       PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.01497

    2. Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation (2015) [8517 citations] [OA]
       Thang Luong, Hieu Pham, Christopher D. Manning
       DOI: 10.18653/v1/d15-1166

    3. Attention mechanisms in computer vision: A survey (2022) [2242 citations] [OA]
       Meng-Hao Guo, Tian-Xing Xu, Jiangjiang Liu, Zheng-Ning Liu, Peng-Tao Jiang +5 more
       DOI: 10.1007/s41095-022-0271-y
       PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.07624

What It Does

paper-search papers "query"
        |
        +--- OpenAlex ---------- phrase search, topic taxonomy, citation ranking
        |
        +--- Semantic Scholar -- TLDR summaries, influential citations, BibTeX
        |
        +--- Unpaywall --------- OA PDF links (when --email is set)
        |
        v
    Merge by DOI -> Rank -> Display / Save / Export

Commands

papers (alias: p)

paper-search papers "query" [options]

repos

paper-search repos "query" [options]

Uses GITHUB_TOKEN env var if available (30 req/min vs 10 req/min without).

recommend (alias: r)

paper-search recommend <paper_id> [options]

Accepts DOI (10.1038/s41586-023-06291-2), arXiv ID (1706.03762, hep-th/9905111), or Semantic Scholar ID.

Same flags as papers: --save, --bibtex, --json, -o, --email, --s2-key, -n.

open

paper-search open <paper_id>

Opens the paper's PDF (or DOI landing page) in the default browser.

Configuration

Environment Variables

Config File

Create ~/.config/paper-search/config.toml to avoid passing flags every time:

email = "you@example.com"
s2_key = "your-semantic-scholar-api-key"
github_token = "ghp_..."

Priority: CLI flags > environment variables > config file.

The --save Flag

When used inside a project directory, --save writes results to .claude/papers.md. This file persists as context for Claude Code, making your paper references available in future conversations.

cd my-research-project
paper-search papers "federated learning" -n 15 --save
# Creates .claude/papers.md with formatted paper references

Running the same query twice with --save won't duplicate the section.

API Keys (Free)

All APIs work without keys, just with lower rate limits:

• OpenAlex: Get a key at openalex.org/settings/api ($1/day free)
• Semantic Scholar: Request at semanticscholar.org/product/api (~1 month wait)
• GitHub: Use an existing GITHUB_TOKEN or create one at github.com/settings/tokens

Development

git clone https://github.com/Csed-dev/paper-search.git
cd paper-search
uv sync --group dev
uv run pytest

Tests use captured API fixtures (no network calls):

uv run pytest tests/ -v    # 84 tests, runs in <1s

To refresh fixtures from live APIs:

uv run python tests/capture_fixtures.py

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

MIT