Semantic Scholar Lookup

Fast, targeted lookups of paper metadata, citations, and authors using the Semantic Scholar API via `asta papers` commands.

When to Use This Skill

User asks for details about a specific paper (by title, DOI, arXiv ID, etc.)
User wants to see papers citing a given work
User asks about an author's papers
User wants a quick keyword search (not a comprehensive report)
User wants to find specific claims, methods, or evidence within paper full text (use
```
snippet-search
```
)
Task requires targeted paper metadata or citation graphs

Not for comprehensive reports - use the Literature Report Generation skill for that.

Related: Find Literature skill

asta papers ...

(this skill) is for mechanical, targeted lookups against the Semantic Scholar API: fetch a known paper, list citations, search by keyword across titles / abstracts / bodies, look up an author. There is no agent-mediated reasoning beyond S2's own keyword ranking.

The Find Literature skill (

asta literature find

asta literature interactive

) is for topic-driven, criterion-based search, where the system extracts relevance criteria from the query, retrieves candidates, and ranks them against those criteria with per-paper relevance summaries — closer to "literature search as a graded judgement" than to a keyword match.

Use this skill (

asta papers

) when:

The user names a specific paper, author, ID, or exact phrase to look up
You need raw metadata (citations, venue, fields of study, openAccessInfo)
You're navigating a citation graph (who cites what, who an author has cited)
You want to grep for a specific string in paper bodies (
```
snippet-search
```
)
You need a fast result and exhaustive coverage isn't required

Use the Find Literature skill instead when:

The user asks "find papers on X", "what does the literature say about Y", "papers that argue Z"
The query is a research topic, not a string match — and ranked relevance with explanations matters
The work session is exploratory: filtering prior results, aggregating, following relations across multiple turns (use
```
asta literature interactive --thread-dir <dir>
```
)
A
```
find
```
-style one-shot or
```
interactive
```
-style multi-turn agent loop with verification will produce a better-ranked result than raw keyword search

The two are complementary. A common flow: use Find Literature to discover relevant papers on a topic, then

asta papers get

asta papers citations

to drill into specific ones.

Session-level rule of thumb: if the session as a whole is about literature search/exploration (e.g. the first user turn is "find papers on X"), default to

asta literature interactive

for the discovery work, even when individual queries look simple. Reach for

asta papers

when the session is about something else and a quick metadata or citation lookup is just one step inside it.

Installation

This skill requires the

asta

CLI:

bash

# Install/reinstall at the correct version
PLUGIN_VERSION=0.17.1
if [ "$(asta --version 2>/dev/null | grep -oE '[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+')" != "$PLUGIN_VERSION" ]; then
  uv tool install --force git+https://github.com/allenai/asta-plugins.git@v$PLUGIN_VERSION
fi

Prerequisites: Python 3.11+ and uv package manager

Available Commands

Get Paper Details

asta papers get - Get metadata for a single paper by ID

bash

asta papers get ARXIV:2005.14165

asta papers get "DOI:10.18653/v1/N18-3011" --fields title,year,authors,abstract

asta papers get CorpusId:215416146 --format text

Supported ID formats:

```
ARXIV:2106.15928
```
```
DOI:10.18653/v1/N18-3011
```
```
CorpusId:215416146
```
```
PMID:19872477
```
```
URL:https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15928
```

Common fields:

title,abstract,authors,year,venue,citationCount,publicationDate,url,isOpenAccess,fieldsOfStudy

Search Papers

asta papers search - Keyword-based paper search

bash

asta papers search "transformers attention mechanism"

asta papers search "RLHF" --date 2023- --limit 10

asta papers search "neural networks" --fields title,year,abstract,authors

asta papers search "LLM safety" --date 2024-01-01:2024-12-31

Options:

```
--fields
```
: Comma-separated fields to return
```
--limit
```
: Number of results (default 20, max 100)
```
--date
```
: Publication date or year filter. Accepts years (
```
2020
```
,
```
2020-2024
```
,
```
2020-
```
) or date ranges (
```
2024-01-01:2024-12-31
```
). Maps to the S2
```
publicationDateOrYear
```
parameter.
```
--format
```
: Output as
```
json
```
or
```
text
```

Snippet Search

asta papers snippet-search - Search over paper full text (title, abstract, and body) via the S2 snippet/search API. Returns matching text excerpts alongside paper metadata.

bash

asta papers snippet-search "in-context learning emerges at scale"

asta papers snippet-search "RLHF reward hacking" --date 2023- --limit 10

asta papers snippet-search "sparse mixture of experts" --fields snippet.text,snippet.snippetKind,snippet.section

# Pin results to papers indexed before a date (useful for reproducible benchmarks)
asta papers snippet-search "chain-of-thought" --inserted-before 2024-01-01

The

--fields

option accepts snippet fields:

```
snippet.text
```
- The matched text excerpt (~500 words)
```
snippet.snippetKind
```
- Source type (e.g., title, abstract, body)
```
snippet.section
```
- Paper section the snippet came from
```
snippet.snippetOffset
```
- Character position data (
```
start
```
,
```
end
```
)
```
snippet.annotations
```
- Markup including reference mentions and sentence boundaries

--fields

is omitted, the default is

snippet.text,snippet.snippetKind

. Paper metadata (corpusId, title, authors, openAccessInfo) and relevance score are always returned regardless of

--fields

Options:

```
--fields
```
: Comma-separated snippet fields to return
```
--date
```
: Date/year filter, same as standard search
```
--limit
```
: Max results (default 20, max 1000 — higher ceiling than standard search)
```
--inserted-before
```
: Only include papers indexed before this date (
```
YYYY-MM-DD
```
,
```
YYYY-MM
```
, or
```
YYYY
```
). Typically used for consistency in benchmarking — pinning a cutoff date ensures the same set of papers is returned across repeated runs, even as new papers are continuously indexed.
```
--format
```
: Output as
```
json
```
or
```
text
```

Get Citations

asta papers citations - Papers that cite a given work

bash

asta papers citations ARXIV:2005.14165

asta papers citations CorpusId:218487638 --limit 20 --format text

Options:

```
--fields
```
: Fields for citing papers
```
--limit
```
: Max results (default 50, max 1000)
```
--format
```
: Output as
```
json
```
or
```
text
```

Author Search and Papers

asta papers author search - Find authors by name

bash

asta papers author search "Yoav Goldberg"

asta papers author search "Hinton" --limit 5 --format text

asta papers author papers - Get papers by an author

bash

# First, get author ID from search
asta papers author search "Yoav Goldberg"

# Then get their papers using the author ID
asta papers author papers 1741101 --limit 50

asta papers author papers 1741101 --fields title,year,venue,citationCount

Options:

```
--fields
```
: Fields to return for papers
```
--limit
```
: Max results (default 50, max 1000)
```
--format
```
: Output as
```
json
```
or
```
text
```

Output Formats

All commands support two output formats:

JSON format (default):

Machine-readable
Complete data structure
Pipe to
```
jq
```
for filtering
Best for programmatic use

Text format (

--format text

Human-readable
Formatted output
Best for quick browsing
Use when showing results to user

Usage Tips

Efficient Field Selection

Only request fields you need for faster responses:

bash

# Good - minimal fields for quick browse
asta papers search "deep learning" --fields title,year,authors,citationCount

# Less efficient - many fields slow down response
asta papers search "deep learning" --fields title,abstract,authors,year,venue,citations,references

Date Filtering

Restrict to recent papers when appropriate:

bash

asta papers search "RLHF" --date 2023-2024  # 2023-2024
asta papers search "RLHF" --date 2023-      # 2023 onwards
asta papers search "RLHF" --date -2020      # Before 2020
asta papers search "RLHF" --date 2024-06-01:2024-12-31  # Specific date range

Piping to jq

For complex JSON processing:

bash

# Extract just titles
asta papers search "transformers" | jq '.data[].title'

# Filter by citation count
asta papers search "neural networks" | jq '.data[] | select(.citationCount > 100)'

# Get author names
asta papers get ARXIV:2005.14165 | jq '.authors[].name'

Multi-Step Workflows

Chain commands for complex queries:

Example 1: Find highly-cited recent papers by an author

bash

# 1. Find author
asta papers author search "Geoffrey Hinton" --format text

# 2. Get their recent papers
asta papers author papers 1751273 --fields title,year,citationCount --limit 50 | \
  jq '.data[].paper | select(.year >= 2020) | select(.citationCount > 100)'

Example 2: Explore citation network

bash

# 1. Get paper details
asta papers get ARXIV:2005.14165

# 2. Get who cited it
asta papers citations ARXIV:2005.14165 --limit 20 --format text

# 3. Get details on specific citing papers
asta papers get CorpusId:123456789

Example Workflows

"Get details for arXiv:2005.14165"

bash

asta papers get ARXIV:2005.14165 --format text

Present the output to user in a readable format.

"What papers cite the GPT-3 paper?"

bash

# GPT-3 paper
asta papers citations ARXIV:2005.14165 --limit 50 --format text

Show recent/highly-cited papers from the results.

"Recent papers on RLHF"

bash

asta papers search "RLHF reinforcement learning from human feedback" \
  --date 2023- \
  --limit 20 \
  --fields title,abstract,year,authors,venue,citationCount \
  --format text

"Papers by Yoav Goldberg"

bash

# Step 1: Find author
asta papers author search "Yoav Goldberg" --format text

# Step 2: Get their papers (using author ID from step 1)
asta papers author papers 1741101 \
  --fields title,year,venue,citationCount \
  --limit 50 \
  --format text

"Find evidence of 'chain-of-thought' reasoning"

bash

# Snippet search finds mentions in paper bodies, not just titles/abstracts
asta papers snippet-search "chain-of-thought reasoning improves performance" \
  --limit 15

# Or use standard search for paper-level results
asta papers search "chain-of-thought reasoning" \
  --fields title,abstract,year,authors \
  --limit 15

# Then examine specific papers with 'asta papers get'

Response Presentation

When showing results to users:

For single paper:

**Title** (Year)
Authors: [author list]
Venue: [venue name]
Citations: [count]

[Abstract]

URL: [Semantic Scholar link]

For paper lists:

Found [N] papers:

1. **Paper Title** - Author et al. (Year) - [Venue] - [X citations]
2. **Another Paper** - ...
...

For snippet results (

snippet-search

Found [N] snippet results:

1. **Paper Title** - Author et al.
   Score: 0.95
   Snippet (abstract): "...matching text excerpt..."
2. **Another Paper** - ...
...

For citations:

Found [N] papers citing this work:

Recent citations:
1. [Paper 1] (2024) - [citations]
2. [Paper 2] (2023) - [citations]
...

Best Practices

Use
```
--format text
```
when showing results directly to user
Use JSON output when you need to process or filter results
Start with small limits, increase if needed
Only fetch fields you'll actually use
Use
```
snippet-search
```
when searching for specific claims, methods, or evidence within paper bodies
Use
```
search
```
for topic-level paper discovery
For comprehensive research, suggest Literature Report Generation skill instead
Provide Semantic Scholar URLs when helpful (
```
https://semanticscholar.org/paper/{paperId}
```
)

API Key

The commands use the

ASTA_TOOL_KEY

environment variable if available. Most queries work without a key, but a key provides higher rate limits.

semantic-scholar

NPX Install

Tags

SKILL.md Content

Semantic Scholar Lookup

When to Use This Skill

Related: Find Literature skill

Installation

Available Commands

Get Paper Details

Search Papers

Snippet Search

Get Citations

Author Search and Papers

Output Formats

Usage Tips

Efficient Field Selection

Date Filtering

Piping to jq

Multi-Step Workflows

Example Workflows

"Get details for arXiv:2005.14165"

"What papers cite the GPT-3 paper?"

"Recent papers on RLHF"

"Papers by Yoav Goldberg"

"Find evidence of 'chain-of-thought' reasoning"

Response Presentation

Best Practices

API Key