Scholar Sidekick (CLI) — Citations, Retraction & Open-Access from the terminal

Turn a scholarly identifier into a formatted citation, a bibliography file, or an integrity check (retraction / open-access / fabrication) by running the scholar command. The CLI is a thin wrapper over the public Scholar Sidekick REST API. No API key required for the free, rate-limited tier — and ergonomic subcommands mean you don't hand-build JSON request bodies.

Sibling skills, same capabilities: use scholar-sidekick-api if there's no Node runtime (plain curl), or scholar-sidekick-mcp if an MCP host is connected. This skill is the typed-CLI path for Node ≥20.

When to Use

• The user has an identifier (DOI, PMID, PMCID, ISBN, arXiv, ISSN, ADS bibcode, WHO IRIS URL) and wants metadata, a formatted citation, or a bibliography file, and the environment has Node ≥20.
• "Cite this in APA/Vancouver/Chicago…", "give me a BibTeX/RIS file", "export these refs to a file".
• "Has this been retracted?", "is this open access?", "is this citation real / did you make it up?"
• Batch jobs: several identifiers at once, or streaming results as they resolve.
• Do NOT use to search for papers by topic — that's discovery (see the arxiv skill). This assumes you already have an identifier.
• Prefer scholar-sidekick-api instead when there is no Node runtime, or scholar-sidekick-mcp when an MCP host is connected.

Install

The CLI ships on npm as scholar-sidekick-cli (bin: scholar). Requires Node.js ≥ 20.