The Scenario
A policy analyst at a think tank has five landmark climate-policy papers that form the empirical backbone of an upcoming briefing document. The question from the policy director is simple: who is building on this work? Which researchers, in which venues, are citing these papers — and how recently? The answer is somewhere in Semantic Scholar. Getting it into a workbook is not.
The bad version:
- Open the Semantic Scholar page for paper 1, scroll to the Cited By section, see 340 citing papers, scroll through the first page, copy the visible titles and years by hand.
- Realize the Cited By list only shows 20 papers per page and has 17 pages. The export option isn't where you expected it.
- By the time you've manually reconstructed 60 citing papers across the first two source papers, you've been at this for two hours and the briefing draft deadline is tomorrow morning.
The citation network is the evidence. The work is interpreting it — not reassembling it from a web interface one scroll at a time.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the paper IDs in column A, calls Semantic Scholar's citations endpoint for each one, and writes every citing paper as its own row — with the source paper clearly labeled.
Here is the prompt for this task:
Pull the full list of citing papers for each DOI in my DOIs column and paste them into a new Excel sheet called Impact, one row per citing paper, with columns for title, year, authors, and the source DOI being cited
What You Get
- An Impact worksheet with one row per citing paper across all five source papers.
- Columns: Source DOI, Citing Paper Title, Year, Authors.
- Papers that cite multiple source papers appear once per source — so your intersection analysis runs cleanly.
- Citation Count on each citing paper is included so you can rank by downstream traction.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Column A contains Semantic Scholar paper IDs rather than DOIs
For each paper ID in column A, fetch all citing papers from Semantic Scholar and write their title, year, authors, and citation count to the Impact worksheet — one row per citing paper — with a Source Paper ID column
You only want citing papers from the last three years
For each DOI in the DOIs column, fetch all citing papers from Semantic Scholar published from 2023 onward, and write title, year, authors, and citation count to the Impact worksheet with a Source DOI column
You need to identify which citing papers also appear in a separate watchlist worksheet
After pulling all citing papers into the Impact worksheet for each DOI in the DOIs column, check each citing paper title against the Watchlist worksheet column A and mark matches with a flag in an On Watchlist column
Resolve IDs, pull citations, filter by year, and rank by downstream impact in one shot
For each DOI in the DOIs column, fetch all citing papers from Semantic Scholar published since 2021, filter to those with at least 5 citations themselves, write title, year, authors, citation count, and source DOI to the Impact worksheet, and sort by citation count descending so the highest-impact citing papers appear first
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook holding the DOIs of your landmark source papers. Ask SheetXAI to map the full citation network into a flat Impact table — and have the downstream-impact data ready for the briefing draft before the deadline.
See also: Export Paper Reference Lists and the Semantic Scholar hub overview.