aps — Academic Paper Search

aps searches academic papers across Semantic Scholar (S2) and OpenAlex (OA), and manages a local paper library with PDF downloads, full-text search, and semantic vector search. Both search backends share a unified interface — learn one, swap the prefix.

Always search both S2 and OA for any query. They index different corpora and return different results. Run both in parallel and combine the findings.

When to Use

• User asks to find academic papers on a topic
• User needs citation counts, references, or paper metadata
• User wants to look up a specific paper by DOI, arXiv ID, or title
• User needs author information (h-index, paper count, affiliations)
• User wants paper recommendations based on a seed paper
• User needs to search full-text passages (S2 snippets)
• User wants to aggregate/analyze publication data (OA group-by)
• User wants to run a repeatable paper-discovery scan from a manifest
• User wants to download a paper PDF for local reading
• User wants to search across downloaded papers (hybrid/semantic/FTS search)
• User wants to manage their local paper library