The Scenario
A content strategist at a scientific publisher is responsible for the editorial calendar for next quarter. The editorial director wants 10 question-format content angles per core topic — the kind of question-shaped queries real researchers type into academic search engines — mapped against how much academic traction the best-matching papers have. Twenty core topic keywords sit in column A of the workbook. The calendar planning session is Friday.
The bad version:
- Take keyword 1, search Semantic Scholar manually, observe what question-phrased queries surface in the results, copy the titles of the most relevant question-format papers, note the citation counts, switch back to the workbook, paste.
- The results don't organize neatly by question format — you're eyeballing which paper titles look like research questions vs. declarative statements.
- By keyword 5 you've spent 45 minutes and have inconsistent data: some rows have citation counts, some don't, the question-format threshold you're applying isn't consistent.
Nobody brought you onto this project to manually audit academic search results. The editorial strategy work starts once the data is in the workbook.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the topic keywords in column A, queries Semantic Scholar for question-format research queries matching each topic, and writes the results into a flat editorial ideas table.
Here is the prompt for this task:
Pull the top 8 question-style search queries from Semantic Scholar for each seed topic in column A and write the matching paper titles, years, and citation counts into a flat Excel table grouped by topic
What You Get
- A flat table with one row per question-format result.
- Columns: Source Keyword, Question Title, Year, Citation Count.
- Citation Count is numeric — you can sort by academic traction immediately.
- All rows land in a single flat table, grouped by keyword and ready for pivot-filtering.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The keywords in column A are too broad and returning general rather than question-format results
For each keyword in column A, append the phrase "how does" or "what is the effect of" to generate a question-format search query, then search Semantic Scholar for the top 8 matching papers by relevance and write title, year, and citation count as a flat table with a Keyword column
You want to restrict results to papers published in the last four years
For each keyword in column A, search Semantic Scholar for question-format paper titles published after 2022, return the top 8 results by citation count, and write keyword, title, year, and citation count as a flat table
You need to cross-reference editorial ideas against already-published content in a separate worksheet
After pulling question-format results for each keyword in column A, check each paper title against the Published worksheet column A and mark any already-covered topic as Already Published in a Status column
Normalize keywords, search, filter by recency, and flag high-citation ideas in one prompt
Trim and lowercase each keyword in column A, search Semantic Scholar for question-format results published after 2021 for each, pull the top 8 by citation count, write keyword, title, year, and citation count as a flat table, and mark any result with more than 100 citations as High-Traction in a Priority column
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a column of core topic keywords from your editorial planning process. Ask SheetXAI to build the question-format ideas table from Semantic Scholar — and walk into Friday's calendar session with ranked content angles already structured.
See also: Extract Text Snippets for Research Questions and the Semantic Scholar hub overview.