Skip to main content
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
Bounty: 5,000 credit reward for solid feedback on /search (GitHub)

To qualify, complete a high-signal interview (thoughtful, concrete use cases, etc) with our Firecrawl Feedback Assistant. Only takes a few minutes, can be stopped at any time, and is both human/agent-friendly (just paste the link into your agentic harness!).

Start the interview

Include your email to be eligible. Interviews are reviewed for quality at the end of each week.

​
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

​
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"

firecrawl research search-papers "diffusion image synthesis" --limit 20

from firecrawl import Firecrawl

firecrawl = Firecrawl(
  # No API key needed to get started; add one for higher rate limits:
  # api_key="fc-YOUR-API-KEY",
)

result = firecrawl.v2.search_papers("diffusion image synthesis", k=20)
print(result)

import { Firecrawl } from "firecrawl";

const firecrawl = new Firecrawl({
  // No API key needed to get started; add one for higher rate limits:
  // apiKey: "fc-YOUR-API-KEY",
});

const result = await firecrawl.research.searchPapers("diffusion image synthesis", {
  k: 20,
});
console.log(result);
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

​
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"

firecrawl research inspect-paper arxiv:1706.03762

from firecrawl import Firecrawl

firecrawl = Firecrawl(
  # No API key needed to get started; add one for higher rate limits:
  # api_key="fc-YOUR-API-KEY",
)

paper = firecrawl.v2.inspect_paper("arxiv:1706.03762")
print(paper)

import { Firecrawl } from "firecrawl";

const firecrawl = new Firecrawl({
  // No API key needed to get started; add one for higher rate limits:
  // apiKey: "fc-YOUR-API-KEY",
});

const paper = await firecrawl.research.getPaper("arxiv:1706.03762");
console.log(paper);

​
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"

firecrawl research read-paper arxiv:1706.03762 --question "What is the attention mechanism?" --limit 4

from firecrawl import Firecrawl

firecrawl = Firecrawl(
  # No API key needed to get started; add one for higher rate limits:
  # api_key="fc-YOUR-API-KEY",
)

passages = firecrawl.v2.read_paper(
    "arxiv:1706.03762",
    "What is the attention mechanism?",
    k=4,
)
print(passages)

import { Firecrawl } from "firecrawl";

const firecrawl = new Firecrawl({
  // No API key needed to get started; add one for higher rate limits:
  // apiKey: "fc-YOUR-API-KEY",
});

const passages = await firecrawl.research.getPaper("arxiv:1706.03762", {
  query: "What is the attention mechanism?",
  k: 4,
});
console.log(passages);
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"

firecrawl research related-papers arxiv:1706.03762 --intent "efficient transformers" --limit 20

from firecrawl import Firecrawl

firecrawl = Firecrawl(
  # No API key needed to get started; add one for higher rate limits:
  # api_key="fc-YOUR-API-KEY",
)

papers = firecrawl.v2.related_papers(
    "arxiv:1706.03762",
    "efficient transformers",
    mode="similar",
    k=20,
)
print(papers)

import { Firecrawl } from "firecrawl";

const firecrawl = new Firecrawl({
  // No API key needed to get started; add one for higher rate limits:
  // apiKey: "fc-YOUR-API-KEY",
});

const papers = await firecrawl.research.similarPapers("arxiv:1706.03762", {
  intent: "efficient transformers",
  mode: "similar",
  k: 20,
});
console.log(papers);
Modes:
  • similar: co-citation and bibliographic-coupling neighborhood
  • citers: papers that cite the seed
  • references: papers cited by the seed

​
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"

firecrawl research search-github "flash attention implementation notes" --limit 10

from firecrawl import Firecrawl

firecrawl = Firecrawl(
  # No API key needed to get started; add one for higher rate limits:
  # api_key="fc-YOUR-API-KEY",
)

results = firecrawl.v2.search_github("flash attention implementation notes", k=10)
print(results)

import { Firecrawl } from "firecrawl";

const firecrawl = new Firecrawl({
  // No API key needed to get started; add one for higher rate limits:
  // apiKey: "fc-YOUR-API-KEY",
});

const results = await firecrawl.research.searchGithub(
  "flash attention implementation notes",
  { k: 10 },
);
console.log(results);
GitHub results include repository, URL, issue/PR metadata when available, snippet, and matched markdown content when available.