RAG over a Research Paper Corpus

The goal is answers a researcher can check: every claim is traceable to a specific passage of a specific paper. Retrieval quality and citation discipline matter more than the choice of vector database.

To discover new candidate papers before building your local collection, use firecrawl-research-index for hosted paper search and passage reads. Save only papers you have a lawful copy of, with their DOI or source ID. This skill indexes the user's own files; Firecrawl's hosted index is not a local corpus download.

Tier 0: citable full-text search in one minute (no dependencies)

1. Convert PDFs to Markdown first (layout-aware converters beat raw PDF text): use the markitdown or liteparse skill, or pip install pypdf for the built-in fallback.
2. Index and query: