Inciteful

Discover academic literature through citation-network analysis instead of keyword matching alone. Inciteful builds a citation graph around one or more seed papers and ranks the network by similarity (co-citation + Adamic-Adar), PageRank, and recency. IDs are OpenAlex IDs, so results interop with the paper-search skill (use its paper.sh for abstracts, which Inciteful does not return).

Setup

Requires bash, curl, and jq (the scripts check and report missing ones).

The scripts live in scripts/ inside this skill directory (the folder containing this SKILL.md). Resolve all paths relative to that skill directory, not the current working directory. Run them with bash so no executable bit is required:

bash <skill-dir>/scripts/search.sh ...

If the skill directory is unknown, locate it (covers the usual harness skill roots):

find ~/.claude ~/.agents ~/.pi/agent ~/.cursor ~/.codex -path "*inciteful/scripts/search.sh" 2>/dev/null | head -1

Workflow

1. search.sh → find the seed paper(s) and grab their OpenAlex IDs (or pass DOIs anywhere IDs are accepted).
2. discover.sh → analyze the citation network around the seeds.
3. Iterate: add promising papers from the results as extra seeds (comma-separated) to sharpen the network.
4. connect.sh when bridging two fields, export.sh to collect references.

Search papers by keyword

bash <skill-dir>/scripts/search.sh "query" [limit]

Fast title search returning id, DOI, authors, journal, and citation count.

Analyze the network around seed papers

bash <skill-dir>/scripts/discover.sh <id1[,id2,...]> [analysis] [limit] [min_year] [max_year] ["keywords"]

• analysis: similar (default), important, reviews, recent, authors, upcoming, institutions, journals
• Seeds accept OpenAlex IDs, bare DOIs, or DOI URLs (resolved via OpenAlex).
• The recommendation from Inciteful: add at least 3–5 seeds for a well-focused network.
• Use keywords (e.g. "heart rate variability") to filter network papers by title match when results feel off-topic.

Analysis semantics:

Look up a paper

bash <skill-dir>/scripts/paper.sh <OpenAlex_ID or DOI>

Returns authors with institutions, PDF links, and samples of its references and citations.

Connect two papers (Literature Connector)

bash <skill-dir>/scripts/connect.sh <from> <to> [extend]

Finds shortest citation paths between two papers. Use extend=5 if no path is found initially (slower).

Run raw SQL on the network

bash <skill-dir>/scripts/query.sh <ids> "SELECT ..."     # or a .sql file

Tables: papers(paper_id, doi, title, authors, journal, published_year, num_cited_by, num_citing, adamic_adar, cocite, page_rank, distance) and authors(paper_id, name, affiliation, partial_page_rank, ...), plus title_search('kw'). distance = 0 for seeds, 1 for their direct neighbors. Examples: papers citing 50+ network papers (reviews logic), most-cited papers excluding the seeds, author overlap between fields.

Export citations

bash <skill-dir>/scripts/export.sh <id1[,id2,...]> [bib|ris]

Tips

• Queries build a live citation graph server-side; allow 5–60 s for discover.sh/query.sh.
• For a literature review: search.sh → discover.sh similar and important → add 3–5 of the best papers as seeds → reviews + recent → export.sh ... bib.
• No abstracts from Inciteful; feed IDs into the paper-search skill for abstracts and full metadata.