Opencite¶

The opencite plugin searches academic literature, explores citation graphs, downloads PDFs, and exports BibTeX. It wraps the opencite CLI, aggregating Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, PubMed, arXiv, and bioRxiv into one interface.

Three search strategies¶

opencite picks a search strategy based on what you're actually looking for:

Opencite search strategies: query for canonical high-citation search, recent/specific search, and citation-graph traversal

Query: canonical, high-citation search for foundational papers on a topic
Recent / specific: targeted search for a known paper or a narrow, recent result
Cite graph: traversal of citation links (what cites this, what this cites)

Batch fetch, two parallel output trees¶

A batch fetch-and-convert run always produces two parallel structures, one for PDFs, one for markdown, because PDFs are sometimes paywalled but a markdown conversion from abstract/metadata is always available:

Opencite output tree: papers/pdf/ (open or paywall per file) and papers/markdown/ (always present) plus img/ for figures

Open badge: the PDF was retrieved successfully and stored under pdf/
Paywall badge: the PDF was blocked; a markdown conversion was still made from the abstract/metadata

This is also the corpus format that manuscript:lit-review's multi-phase mode builds paper-cards from.

Skills¶

opencite: literature search across the aggregated sources above, citation-graph exploration, PDF download, PDF-to-markdown conversion, and BibTeX export

Try it¶

"Find the top 10 most cited papers on brain-computer interfaces"
"Look up DOI 10.1038/nature12373 and download the PDF"
"Convert this PDF to markdown"

Learn more¶

The Agentic Research Course week 5, "Literature Search and Review," covers this plugin hands-on.

Note

The opencite plugin here is a snapshot of the standalone neuromechanist/opencite plugin. If you've already installed that standalone plugin, don't install it again from this marketplace; having both installed creates duplicate skills.