Follow who built on what,
not just what exists.
Most indexes tell you a paper's backward references. Semantic Scholar walks the other direction — the forward citation graph, the papers that cite this one. semantic_scholar_search finds the work; semantic_scholar_citations shows who took it further.
What the instrument does
Semantic Scholar is the Allen Institute's scholarly graph — papers, abstracts, citation counts and, distinctively, the forward citation edges that let you trace a line of work forward in time.
On the console, semantic_scholar_search queries papers and semantic_scholar_citations returns the works that cite a given paper — the shortest path to what happened next.
Tools this powers on the console
semantic_scholar_search · semantic_scholar_citations
Research use only. Service names belong to their owners; no partnership or endorsement is implied.
How Perslis integrates Semantic Scholar
Its unique value on the console is direction. Given a landmark paper — say AlphaFold's Nature article, DOI 10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2 — the citation instrument walks forward to the work that built on it, turning a single reference into a live research front an agent can follow.
The unauthenticated tier is rate-limited, and the runtime treats that honestly: a throttled call is reported as unverified, never silently dropped or filled with a guessed number. It pairs with OpenAlex, whose open breadth backs up any gap.
Ask
One question at the console — no per-service query language, no tab-hopping.
Route
Lois calls this instrument alongside the others and gathers what returns.
Pin
Every field keeps its source: database, accession, URL. A result that cannot name its source is refused by construction.
Admit
The PEEL gate decides what enters the lab record. Reported values stay verbatim; unsupported claims stay out.
A real, source-pinned result
Pulled live from the service and pinned to its identifier — the same contract every answer on the console is held to.
| Anchor paper | Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold |
|---|---|
| Venue | Nature, 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2 |
| Instrument | semantic_scholar_citations → who cited it |
| Rate-limited call | reported as unverified, never faked |
Source: semantic scholar · via DOI · unauthenticated tier is rate-limited
Why route Semantic Scholar through one console
Citation graph, callable
An agent walks forward from a paper to what built on it — a research front, not a static reference list.
Depth beside breadth
Semantic Scholar's forward edges complement OpenAlex's discipline-wide coverage in one answer.
Honest under rate limits
A throttled response is marked unverified — the runtime never invents a citation count to look complete.
Instruments Semantic Scholar talks to
Direction and breadth reinforce each other. Semantic Scholar answers beside OpenAlex and the literature indexes.
