paper-search

Search for academic papers by keyword, or look up a specific paper by DOI or OpenAlex ID. Powered by OpenAlex (250M+ works, free, no API key).

install

source · Clone the upstream repo

git clone https://github.com/ykdojo/paper-search

Claude Code · Install into ~/.claude/skills/

T=$(mktemp -d) && git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/ykdojo/paper-search "$T" && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r "$T/skills/paper-search" ~/.claude/skills/ykdojo-paper-search-paper-search && rm -rf "$T"

manifest: skills/paper-search/SKILL.md

source content

Search for academic papers and get details including title, authors, citation count, DOI, abstract, and open access links.

Steps:

Find the scripts directory:
```
find ~/.claude -name "search.sh" -path "*/paper-search/*" 2>/dev/null | sort -V | tail -1
```
- This finds the script whether installed via plugin or manual setup
- The
```
paper.sh
```
  script is in the same directory

To search for papers by keyword:

<scripts-dir>/search.sh "your search query" [limit] [sort] [page]

```
limit
```
: number of results per page (default: 10, max: 200)
```
sort
```
:
```
relevance
```
(default),
```
cites
```
, or
```
date
```
```
page
```
: page number for pagination (default: 1)

To look up a specific paper by DOI or OpenAlex ID:

<scripts-dir>/paper.sh <DOI_URL or OpenAlex_ID>

Accepts full DOI URLs like
```
https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci8020020
```
Or OpenAlex IDs like
```
W2789811475
```
Returns full details: authors, abstract, concepts, open access PDF link, related works

Tips:

Use
```
relevance
```
sort (default) for topical searches. Use
```
cites
```
when you want landmark papers.
Be specific with queries — "bilingual cognitive advantages executive function" beats "bilingualism brain".
Use
```
paper.sh
```
to get the full abstract when search results show "Abstract: N/A".
The
```
related_works
```
IDs from
```
paper.sh
```
can be fed back into
```
paper.sh
```
to explore the citation graph.
When the user asks for scientific backing: search broadly first, pick the most relevant/cited papers, then use
```
paper.sh
```
for full details and cite as (Author, Year, Journal).