firecrawl-research-index

SKILL.md

Firecrawl Research Index

Find the research papers that answer a research query. Some questions have a single answer; many have several — and when in doubt, lean toward returning the fuller relevant set (most relevant first) rather than narrowing to one. A reader is better served seeing the neighboring methods and papers than having them silently dropped.

What is in the index

Paper abstracts, with full text reachable per paper. The largest share of the corpus is biomedical and life-science literature — PubMed journal articles plus bioRxiv and medRxiv preprints — so clinical, drug, gene, disease, epidemiology, and public-health questions are in scope. arXiv preprints cover computer science, physics, and mathematics. Coverage outside those sources is thinner: a paper that exists only behind a publisher paywall or in a niche venue may not be indexed, and the general web tools below are the fallback when it isn't.

There is no fixed recipe. Read the query, decide what kind it is, and choose the approach below. Some queries need a single search; others need heavy structural/semantic expansion. Don't run machinery a query doesn't call for.

The tools, and what each is uniquely good at

MCP: firecrawl_research_search_papers(query, k?)
CLI: firecrawl research search-papers <query> [--k <number>]
Semantic (HyDE) search over abstracts. The natural first move for almost any query.
If results look thin or all-alike, re-run with a different framing (sibling domain, rival method, dataset/benchmark name) rather than giving up.