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Firecrawl Research is a purpose-built index for scientific and engineering research agents. It exposes a research-specific toolset for searching papers, inspecting paper metadata, reading relevant full-text passages, discovering related papers through structural expansion, and searching over research-related GitHub repos.
  • Find papers by topic, method, benchmark, author, or category
  • Inspect canonical paper metadata and source ids
  • Read the passages in one paper that answer a specific question
  • Expand from strong seed papers to related papers, citers, or references
  • Search GitHub history and READMEs for implementation notes, bugs, and design discussions
To give your agent access to the Research Index, we strongly recommend using our CLI or MCP, combined with our dedicated research skill, which you can install with:
npx skills add firecrawl/skills@firecrawl-research-index

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Endpoints

TaskEndpoint
Search papersGET /search/research/papers
Inspect metadata or read passagesGET /search/research/papers/{id}
Find related papersGET /search/research/papers/{id}/similar
Search GitHub historyGET /search/research/github

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Search papers

Search paper abstracts with a natural-language query. The response returns ranked papers with canonical paperId, preferred primaryId, source ids, title, abstract, score, and optional ranking signals. 
# No API key needed to get started; add -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" for higher rate limits:
curl -s "https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/search/research/papers?query=diffusion%20image%20synthesis&k=20"
Optional filters:
  • authors: author substring filter; all filters must match
  • categories: paper category filter, such as cs.LG
  • from: inclusive created/updated lower bound, YYYY-MM-DD
  • to: inclusive created/updated upper bound, YYYY-MM-DD

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Inspect a paper

Use a canonical paperId or a source-specific primaryId. 
# No API key needed to get started; add -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" for higher rate limits:
curl -s "https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/search/research/papers/arxiv:1706.03762"

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Read paper passages

Add query to the same paper path to retrieve the top full-text passages for a question. This is useful for verifying whether a candidate paper actually contains a method, dataset, constraint, or result before you include it. 
# No API key needed to get started; add -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" for higher rate limits:
curl -s "https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/search/research/papers/arxiv:1706.03762?query=what%20is%20the%20attention%20mechanism&k=4"
Expand from one or more seed papers through semantic expansion and rank the candidates against a natural-language intent. 
# No API key needed to get started; add -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" for higher rate limits:
curl -s "https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/search/research/papers/arxiv:1706.03762/similar?intent=efficient%20transformers&mode=similar&k=20"
Modes:
  • similar: co-citation and bibliographic-coupling neighborhood
  • citers: papers that cite the seed
  • references: papers cited by the seed

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Search GitHub history

Search GitHub issues, pull requests, discussions, and repository READMEs for implementation details and engineering prior art. 
# No API key needed to get started; add -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" for higher rate limits:
curl -s "https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/search/research/github?query=flash%20attention%20implementation%20notes&k=10"
GitHub results include repository, URL, issue/PR metadata when available, snippet, and matched markdown content when available.