Firecrawl Research Index

Find the research papers that answer a research query. Some questions have a single answer; many have several — and when in doubt, lean toward returning the fuller relevant set (most relevant first) rather than narrowing to one. A reader is better served seeing the neighboring methods and papers than having them silently dropped.

There is no fixed recipe. Read the query, decide what kind it is, and choose the approach below. Some queries need a single search; others need heavy sturctural/semantic expansion. Don't run machinery a query doesn't call for.

The tools, and what each is uniquely good at

• MCP: firecrawl_research_search_papers(query, k?) CLI: firecrawl research search-papers <query> [--k <number>] Semantic (HyDE) search over abstracts. The natural first move for almost any query. If results look thin or all-alike, re-run with a different framing (sibling domain, rival method, dataset/benchmark name) rather than giving up.

• MCP: firecrawl_research_related_papers(seed_ids, intent, mode?, k?) CLI: firecrawl research related-papers <seedIds...> --intent <intent> [--mode <similar|citers|references>] [--k <number>] Semantic and structural expansion, ranked to your intent. This reaches papers semantic search cannot, and it's how you turn one good hit into the rest of a set. mode=similar → niche siblings; citers → who uses/builds on the seeds; references → what they build on / compare against.