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
bash
paper-search search "transformer attention mechanism" --max 5
Search with category filter
bash
paper-search search "reinforcement learning" --max 10 --categories cs.AI,cs.LG
Get paper details by arXiv ID
bash
paper-search details 1706.03762
Download paper PDF
bash
paper-search download 1706.03762 --output /workspace/papers/
JSON output (for programmatic use)
bash
paper-search search "neural networks" --max 3 --json
Example Workflows
Find important papers on a topic
bash
# 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
bash
# 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
bash
paper-search search "au:Hinton" --max 10
arXiv Categories
Common categories for filtering:
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| cs.AI | Artificial Intelligence |
| cs.LG | Machine Learning |
| cs.CL | Computation and Language (NLP) |
| cs.CV | Computer Vision |
| cs.NE | Neural and Evolutionary Computing |
| cs.RO | Robotics |
| stat.ML | Statistics - Machine Learning |
| math.OC | Optimization and Control |
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:
1706.03762orcs.AI/0001001
Output Locations
- •Papers list: stdout or
--jsonto 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