PaperCli — All-in-One Academic Paper Search CLI

A single command-line tool to search, download, and read academic papers across 25+ keyless sources — ArXiv, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, CrossRef, OpenAlex, Google Scholar, DBLP, and many more. No API keys, no accounts, no auth.

Supported Sources

All sources are free and require no authentication.

#	Source	Type
1	ArXiv	Preprints (CS, Physics, Math)
2	PubMed	Biomedical literature
3	Semantic Scholar	AI-powered academic search
4	CrossRef	DOI metadata
5	OpenAlex	Open scholarly metadata
6	DBLP	Computer science bibliography
7	Google Scholar	Web scraping (scholarly lib)
8	Google Scholar (HTML)	Direct HTML parsing
9	bioRxiv	Biology preprints
10	medRxiv	Medical preprints
11	Europe PMC	European biomedical literature
12	PubMed Central	Full-text biomedical articles
13	HuggingFace	Daily trending AI papers
14	PapersWithCode	ML papers with code
15	HAL	French national open archive
16	DOAJ	Open access journals
17	Zenodo	Open research data
18	OpenAIRE	European open access
19	INSPIRE-HEP	High energy physics
20	IACR	Cryptography ePrint archive
21	CiteSeerX	CS digital library
22	SSRN	Social science preprints
23	BASE	Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
24	ChemRxiv	Chemistry preprints
25	Sci-Hub	PDF fetcher

Quick Start

Install

pip install -e .
# or
uv pip install -e .

This installs two equivalent commands: paper-cli and paper-search.

Usage

# Search across all sources
paper-cli search "transformer architectures" -n 5

# Search specific sources
paper-cli search "CRISPR" -s pubmed,biorxiv,europepmc

# Download a paper PDF
paper-cli download arxiv 2401.12345

# Read paper text (download + extract)
paper-cli read arxiv 2401.12345

# List available sources
paper-cli sources

You can also run it as a module:

python -m paper_cli search "diffusion models" -n 3

Commands

search <query> [-n N] [-s SOURCES]

Search for papers across sources in parallel and print merged results.

• -n, --max-results: results per source (default: 5)
• -s, --sources: comma-separated sources or all (default: all)

download <source> <paper_id> [-o DIR]

Download a paper PDF. -o sets the output directory (default: ./downloads).

read <source> <paper_id> [-o DIR]

Download and extract the full text of a paper.

sources

List every available source.

Source Aliases

Alias	Source
arxiv	ArXiv
ss, s2, semanticscholar	Semantic Scholar
scholar, google	Google Scholar (scholarly)
google_scholar	Google Scholar (HTML)
crossref, cr	CrossRef
openalex, oa	OpenAlex
pubmed, pm	PubMed
pmc, pubmedcentral	PubMed Central
biorxiv	bioRxiv
medrxiv	medRxiv
europepmc, epmc	Europe PMC
hf, huggingface	HuggingFace
pwc, paperswithcode	PapersWithCode
dblp	DBLP
hal	HAL
doaj	DOAJ
zenodo	Zenodo
openaire	OpenAIRE
inspirehep, inspire	INSPIRE-HEP
iacr	IACR ePrint
citeseerx	CiteSeerX
ssrn	SSRN
base	BASE
chemrxiv	ChemRxiv

Configuration

PaperCli works out of the box with no configuration. The only optional environment variables are conveniences (not credentials):

# Storage path for downloaded papers (default: ~/.paper-cli/papers)
PAPER_CLI_STORAGE=~/.paper-cli/papers

# Optional proxy for Google Scholar to avoid rate limits
PAPER_CLI_GOOGLE_SCHOLAR_PROXY_URL=

Docker

docker build -t paper-cli .
docker run --rm paper-cli search "graph neural networks" -n 3

Project Structure

src/paper_cli/
├── __init__.py          # Package entry point
├── __main__.py          # python -m paper_cli
├── cli.py               # CLI interface (paper-cli / paper-search)
├── paper.py             # Paper dataclass model
├── config.py            # Environment configuration
├── utils.py             # DOI extraction utilities
└── sources/
    ├── unified.py       # Parallel search dispatcher
    ├── base.py          # Abstract PaperSource base class
    ├── oaipmh.py        # OAI-PMH protocol base
    ├── arxiv.py         # ArXiv
    ├── pubmed.py        # PubMed
    ├── semanticscholar.py # Semantic Scholar
    ├── crossref.py      # CrossRef
    ├── openalex.py      # OpenAlex
    ├── dblp.py          # DBLP
    ├── scholar.py       # Google Scholar (scholarly)
    ├── google_scholar.py # Google Scholar (HTML)
    ├── biorxiv.py       # bioRxiv
    ├── medrxiv.py       # medRxiv
    ├── europepmc.py     # Europe PMC
    ├── pmc.py           # PubMed Central
    ├── huggingface.py   # HuggingFace Daily Papers
    ├── paperswithcode.py # PapersWithCode
    ├── hal.py           # HAL
    ├── doaj.py          # DOAJ
    ├── zenodo.py        # Zenodo
    ├── openaire.py      # OpenAIRE
    ├── inspirehep.py    # INSPIRE-HEP
    ├── iacr.py          # IACR ePrint
    ├── citeseerx.py     # CiteSeerX
    ├── ssrn.py          # SSRN
    ├── base_search.py   # BASE
    ├── chemrxiv.py      # ChemRxiv
    └── sci_hub.py       # Sci-Hub

License

MIT