Search Papers
search_papersRead-only
Search Scholar Feed's 600k+ CS/AI/ML paper corpus. Semantic (embedding) search by default, so it finds conceptually related work even when the wording differs. EVERY PARAMETER DOCUMENTS ITS OWN BEHAVIOUR AND COVERAGE LIMITS — read the ones you intend to use; this description covers only what no single parameter can tell you. RETRIEVAL LIMIT: semantic ranking favours recent, stylistically-matched papers and routinely MISSES the old high-citation anchor of a field (H2O for KV eviction, GRIT for unified embedding+generation). To reach a field's canonical work, read the top-5 abstracts for repeated baseline mentions ('we compare against X') and look that name up directly, or call get_foundational_lineage. THREE UNRELATED NOTIONS OF IMPACT, easily confused: proven citations (sort='impactful', min_citations) | a ~90-day forecast percentile that is NULL on older papers and therefore excludes them (sort='trending', impact_min) | GitHub adoption (sort='community', min_stars). YOUR LIBRARY IS MARKED INLINE on authenticated calls: each hit carries is_saved and is_read, and a hit you previously annotated carries note_text — your own earlier verdict. Read note_text INSTEAD of re-deriving a conclusion from the abstract; re-judging a paper you already ruled on is the most common way an agent wastes a research session. is_saved=false is a real measurement; on anonymous calls these keys are absent entirely, so never read a missing is_saved as false. Papers new to you are ranked exactly as before — nothing is demoted for being unseen.
Input Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| q | No | Search query keywords. REQUIRED unless (a) anchor_paper_id or scope_to_citations_of is set (anchor mode ignores q and returns papers similar to the anchor), or (b) sort is one of 'trending' / 'recent' / 'impactful' — the query-less 'browse the frontier' feed, which is capped to the FIRST 200 RESULTS (paging past offset 200 is a 422; narrow with q= or filters instead). Any other q-less call is a 422, INCLUDING a q-less call with only filters (category/days/...) and a q-less sort='community'. Filters alone do NOT substitute for q — pair them with a browse sort (e.g. category='cs.AI' + sort='recent') or pass q. For 'what's hot in AI right now', either sort='trending' alone or a broad q plus sort='trending' works. | |
| days | No | Limit to papers published within N days | |
| mode | No | Search mode. 'semantic' (default) uses embedding similarity — finds conceptually related papers even without exact keyword matches. 'keyword' uses Postgres full-text search — faster but only matches exact terms. | |
| page | No | Page number | |
| sort | No | Result ranking — a relevance↔impact dial plus time-based and adoption orders. 'relevance' (default) = best topical match. 'balanced' = relevant AND well-cited. 'impactful' = the most-cited (proven-influential) papers among those relevant to the query — use this for 'the important/seminal papers on topic X'. 'trending' = rising/FORECAST impact (impact_pct, last ~90 days) — use for 'what's hot/new in X', NOT for established work. 'recent' = newest first. 'community' = GitHub adoption (stars + star-velocity) — surfaces the papers practitioners are actually running/building on, independent of citations. COVERAGE CAVEAT (the analogue of impact_min's ~90-day hole): an unfetched repo stores 0 rather than NULL, and coverage skews heavily toward recently-published papers, so most older papers with a repo currently rank as 0-star and sink — 'community' reflects measured adoption, not corpus-wide adoption. Proven impact ('impactful'/'balanced') ranks by real citations; 'trending' is a model prediction; 'community' is real-world engineering traction within its window. Pair with get_foundational_lineage for a topic's canonical roots. | |
| task | No | Filter by task e.g. 'image classification', 'question answering' (partial match) | |
| limit | No | Results per page (max 50) | |
| cursor | No | Cursor from previous response's next_cursor for keyset pagination | |
| fields | No | Comma-separated list of fields to return (e.g. 'arxiv_id,title,llm_summary,llm_novelty_score'). If omitted, returns the lean 12-field default unless verbose=true. | |
| dataset | No | Filter to papers that evaluate on a specific dataset e.g. 'MMLU', 'ImageNet' | |
| verbose | No | If true, returns the full 28-field paper shape (method/task/dataset extraction, application_domain, baselines, etc.). Default false returns the lean 12-field set. Ignored when `fields` is provided. | |
| category | No | Filter by arXiv category e.g. 'cs.AI', 'cs.LG' | |
| has_code | No | Filter to papers with a linked code release (has_code=true). Surfaces runnable/reproducible work — pair with min_stars/sort='community' to find the papers practitioners actually adopt. | |
| min_stars | No | Minimum GitHub stars on the paper's linked repo. A proxy for engineering adoption — surfaces work that practitioners are actually running/building on. Pair with sort='community' to rank by it. COVERAGE CAVEAT: a never-fetched repo is stored as 0, not NULL, so this filter cannot distinguish 'no adoption' from 'never measured'. It is applied as 'KNOWN to have >= N stars' — papers whose stars were never fetched are excluded rather than treated as 0-star, so the result is honest but INCOMPLETE: a genuinely popular older paper can be missing simply because nobody measured it. Coverage skews toward recently-published papers and is being backfilled. Use it to filter recent work; for established papers use min_citations instead. | |
| impact_min | No | Minimum impact_pct (0-100), e.g. 80 = top 20% FORECAST impact. This is a RISING-WORK filter: impact_pct is only computed for the last ~90 days, so impact_min restricts results to recent papers predicted to land well AND DROPS everything older. Use it for 'what's rising in X'. Do NOT use it to find the influential/seminal papers in a topic — that excludes the established work; use sort='impactful' instead. | |
| exclude_ids | No | arXiv IDs to exclude from results (for deduplication across chained calls) | |
| method_name | No | Filter to papers introducing/using a specific named method e.g. 'LoRA', 'YOLO', 'DPO'. Case-insensitive substring match on the extracted method_name field. | |
| novelty_min | No | Minimum novelty score (0-1). Use 0.5+ for novel papers. | |
| min_citations | No | Minimum real citation count. Unlike impact_min (a ~90-day FORECAST percentile), this filters on PROVEN citations and keeps established/canonical papers. | |
| task_category | No | Filter by broad research area | |
| anchor_paper_id | No | Return papers similar to this arXiv paper ID. When set, q is ignored and results carry similarity_score. Example: '2407.15831'. | |
| method_category | No | Filter by method category e.g. 'reinforcement learning', 'transformer' | |
| published_after | No | Only papers published on or after this date, 'YYYY-MM-DD'. Use with published_before to bound an arbitrary date window (days only gives a rolling N-day lookback). | |
| published_before | No | Only papers published on or before this date, 'YYYY-MM-DD'. Pair with published_after for an explicit window. | |
| contribution_type | No | Filter by paper's contribution type | |
| github_url_exists | No | Filter on whether the paper has a linked GitHub URL (true = only papers with a repo). Stricter than has_code (which counts any code link). | |
| scope_to_citations_of | No | Restrict search to this paper's citation graph, ranked by relevance to q. Pass the arXiv ID of the paper whose citations you want to search within. |
Output Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| mode | No | Search mode actually applied. | |
| note | No | ||
| page | No | ||
| sort | No | Search sort order actually applied. | |
| limit | No | ||
| topic | No | ||
| total | No | Total results available for the query. null when the count was skipped (query-less browse, or the count query timed out). | |
| papers | No | Matched / returned papers. | |
| direction | No | Citation direction (get_citations: citing | cited_by). | |
| not_found | No | Requested IDs that had no match. | |
| next_cursor | No | Keyset cursor for the next page, or null when exhausted. |