Academic Search — Paper Discovery

Overview

Search academic papers on arXiv using the paper-search CLI tool. No API key required — uses the free arXiv API directly.

When To Use

• User asks to find/search papers on a topic
• User wants paper recommendations
• User needs to download a paper PDF
• User mentions arXiv, academic papers, or research literature

Commands

Search papers by keyword

paper-search search "transformer attention mechanism" --max 5

Search with category filter

paper-search search "reinforcement learning" --max 10 --categories cs.AI,cs.LG

Get paper details by arXiv ID

paper-search details 1706.03762

Download paper PDF

paper-search download 1706.03762 --output /workspace/papers/

JSON output (for programmatic use)

paper-search search "neural networks" --max 3 --json

Example Workflows

Find important papers on a topic

# Search for recent transformer papers
paper-search search "vision transformer ViT" --max 10 --categories cs.CV

# Get details of the seminal paper
paper-search details 2010.11929

Build a reading list

# Search and save results
paper-search search "large language models" --max 20 --json > /workspace/papers/llm-papers.json

# Download key papers
paper-search download 2005.14165 -o /workspace/papers/  # GPT-3
paper-search download 2302.13971 -o /workspace/papers/  # LLaMA

Research a specific author

paper-search search "au:Hinton" --max 10

arXiv Categories

Common categories for filtering:

Search Tips

• Use quotes for exact phrases: "attention is all you need"
• Search by author: au:Vaswani
• Search by title: ti:transformer
• Combine: "neural network" AND au:LeCun
• arXiv ID format: 1706.03762 or cs.AI/0001001

Output Locations

• Papers list: stdout or --json to file
• Downloaded PDFs: /workspace/papers/ (default)

Important Notes

• arXiv API has rate limits; avoid rapid-fire requests
• PDFs are typically 1-10 MB each
• Search results are sorted by relevance by default
• Published dates are in YYYY-MM-DD format