firecrawl-research-papers

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from when this skill was listed. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
name: firecrawl-research-papers
description: Find and synthesize research papers, whitepapers, PDFs, technical reports, and academic sources with Firecrawl Research, using semantic paper search, related-paper expansion, and in-body verification over Firecrawl's paper index — largely biomedical and life-science literature from PubMed, bioRxiv, and medRxiv, plus arXiv preprints in CS, physics, and math. Use when the user wants a literature review, systematic review, survey of studies, paper summary, research landscape, or sourced synthesis from scholarly and industry publications, including clinical, drug, gene, disease, epidemiology, and public-health topics. Prefer this over a general web-research workflow whenever the evidence base is published papers rather than web pages.
license: ISC
metadata:
  author: firecrawl
  version: "0.1.0"
  homepage: https://www.firecrawl.dev
  source: https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows
inputs:
  - name: FIRECRAWL_API_KEY
    description: Firecrawl API key for hosted Firecrawl Research, CLI, MCP, or equivalent tool requests.
    required: true
---

# Firecrawl Research Papers

Use this to create a sourced literature review.

## Onboarding Interview

Infer the topic, source constraints, target count, and output format from context. If the topic is clear, proceed immediately.

Ask at most 1-3 concise questions only if blocked, such as the topic, target paper count, or required venue/date/method constraints.

## Firecrawl Collection Plan

Use Firecrawl Research through the CLI, MCP, or equivalent Firecrawl tool
surface as the primary path for paper discovery and verification. Fall back to
general Firecrawl search and scrape for whitepapers, technical reports,
research blogs, leaderboards, or facts outside the paper corpus.

What the paper index holds: paper abstracts, with full text reachable per
paper. Its largest share is biomedical and life-science literature — PubMed
journal articles plus bioRxiv and medRxiv preprints — so clinical, drug, gene,
disease, epidemiology, and public-health questions are in scope. arXiv
preprints cover computer science, physics, and mathematics. Coverage outside
those sources is thinner, and the web tools below are the fallback there.

Core tools:

- MCP: `firecrawl_research_search_papers(query, k?)`
  CLI: `firecrawl research search-papers <query> [--k <number>]`
  Semantic search over paper abstracts. Start here for most paper-finding
  queries, and retry with alternate framing when results are thin or too
  narrow.
- MCP: `firecrawl_research_related_papers(seed_ids, intent, mode?, k?)`
  CLI: `firecrawl research related-papers <seedIds...> --intent <intent> [--mode <similar|citers|references>] [--k <number>]`
  Expand from strong seed papers into similar work, citing papers, or
  references. Use this to find the relevant paper family, not just the first
  matching result.
- MCP: `firecrawl_research_inspect_paper(id)`
  CLI: `firecrawl research inspect-paper <id>`
  Fetch canonical metadata for a candidate paper: title, abstract, authors,
  categories, source ids, and dates.
- MCP: `firecrawl_research_read_paper(id, question)`
  CLI: `firecrawl research read-paper <id> --question <question>`
  Verify a specific claim or constraint inside one paper, such as method,
  reported score, benchmark, affiliation, comparison, or limitation.
- MCP: `firecrawl_search(query)` / `firecrawl_scrape(url)`
  CLI: `firecrawl search <query>` / `firecrawl scrape <url>`
  Use for web-only context: benchmark leaderboards, rankings, reports,
  whitepapers, research blogs, and source pages outside the paper index.

Not the paper index, despite the name: passing `categories: ["research"]` to
`firecrawl_search` (CLI `firecrawl search <query> --categories research`)
filters an ordinary web search to research-affiliated websites — the list
includes PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and publisher sites — and returns
page results from them. It reaches those sites' web pages; wha