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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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I Built a CLI to Search 800M+ Academic Papers From Your Terminal

#python #tutorial #api #productivity

I got tired of switching between 6 different academic databases. OpenAlex for bibliometrics, Crossref for DOIs, PubMed for medical papers, Semantic Scholar for AI summaries...

So I combined them all into one CLI.

$ research search "large language models" --limit 3

 1. Attention Is All You Need (2017)
    Authors: Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar
    Citations: 95,234 | Source: OpenAlex

 2. Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (2020)
    Authors: Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder
    Citations: 28,847 | Source: OpenAlex

 3. BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers (2019)
    Authors: Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee
    Citations: 78,421 | Source: OpenAlex
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One Command, 7 Databases 

# Default (OpenAlex — 250M+ papers)
research search "quantum computing"

# Medical papers (PubMed — 36M+)
research search "covid vaccine" --source pubmed

# AI-powered with TLDR summaries (Semantic Scholar — 200M+)
research search "chain of thought" --source semantic-scholar

# DOI metadata (Crossref — 150M+)
research search "CRISPR" --source crossref

# Look up any DOI
research doi 10.1038/nature12373
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Total searchable records: 800M+

Why I Built This

I was writing a literature review. My workflow:

  1. Search Google Scholar (no API, no export)
  2. Copy-paste titles into Crossref for DOIs
  3. Check Semantic Scholar for citation counts
  4. Check PubMed for medical relevance
  5. Manually compile everything into a spreadsheet

This took hours. Now:

research search "gene therapy 2024" --source crossref --csv results.csv --limit 100
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One command. One CSV. Done.

Export to CSV or JSON 

# CSV export — ready for Excel/Google Sheets
research search "renewable energy" --csv papers.csv --limit 100

# JSON export — ready for scripts
research search "robotics" --json papers.json
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CSV columns: title, authors, year, citations, doi, source

The Databases

Source Records No API Key Best For
OpenAlex 250M+ ✅ Bibliometrics
Crossref 150M+ ✅ DOI metadata
Semantic Scholar 200M+ ✅* AI summaries
CORE 300M+ Free key Full text
PubMed 36M+ ✅ Medical
arXiv 2M+ ✅ Preprints

* Free with optional API key for higher limits

Get It 

git clone https://github.com/spinov001-art/research-paper-cli.git
cd research-paper-cli
pip install requests
python research_cli.py search "your query here"
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No signup. No API key. Just works.

GitHub: research-paper-cli

Individual toolkit repos:

What's your workflow for finding academic papers? Still using Google Scholar?

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