firecrawl-research-index

Original：🇺🇸 English

Translated

Find papers in Firecrawl's research paper index (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv). Use for literature-finding of any kind, including clinical and biomedical questions; `search --categories research` is a website filter, not this index.

2installs

Sourcefirecrawl/cli

Added on2026-08-21

NPX Install

npx skill4agent add firecrawl/cli firecrawl-research-index

SKILL.md Content

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firecrawl research

Find the papers that answer a research query. When in doubt, return the relevant set (most relevant first) rather than one hit.

Quick start

bash

mkdir -p .firecrawl
firecrawl research search-papers "CRISPR base editing off-target effects" \
  --limit 20 -o .firecrawl/papers.json --json
jq -r '.results[] | .primaryId, .title' .firecrawl/papers.json

Run

firecrawl research <subcommand> --help

for flags. MCP arguments use

paperId

, not

id

.

A successful

search-papers

response is

{success, results}

. Each hit carries

paperId

,

primaryId

(

pmid:

,

pmcid:

,

doi:

, or

arxiv:

),

ids

,

title

,

abstract

, and

score

.

Done when: the answer is a cited paper set (or the one named paper), each kept or dropped against a verified constraint, with

search-papers

as the first move unless the query already named an id.

Tips

```
search-papers
```
is the first move. If results look thin or all-alike, re-run with a different framing (sibling domain, rival method, dataset/benchmark name).
```
related-papers
```
needs
```
--intent
```
.
```
mode=similar
```
for siblings,
```
citers
```
for who builds on the seeds,
```
references
```
for what they build on.
```
inspect-paper
```
is metadata for one id.
```
read-paper
```
is in-body passages for one constraint (sample size, method, affiliation). Use it to rule a paper out, not to gatekeep.
```
search --categories research
```
is a website filter. It returns pages from academic domains, not paper records in this index.
Named paper ("the Qwen3 report") → one
```
search-papers
```
. Method / family / "papers that do X" → expand with
```
related-papers
```
and keep neighbors.
Superlative / leaderboard questions live on the web:
```
firecrawl search
```
/
```
firecrawl scrape
```
, then
```
search-papers
```
each top entry.
PubMed, bioRxiv, and medRxiv are the largest part of the corpus. Do not send a biomedical query to the open web on the assumption the index is arXiv-only.