The Scenario
You're the department administrator preparing the annual research-output report. The provost's office wants a flat table of every paper published by the 25 faculty members in your department over the last five years — title, year, co-authors, citation count — sorted by citation count. The faculty list with Semantic Scholar author IDs already exists in a worksheet someone built two years ago. What doesn't exist is the table of papers.
The bad version:
- Open the Semantic Scholar profile for faculty member 1, scroll through their publication list, export what's available, reformat the CSV to match your column structure, import into the workbook.
- Repeat for faculty member 2. Realize the exported CSV uses a different date format than the one you just imported.
- Faculty member 7 has 300 papers. The export only returns the first 100. Now you need to figure out how pagination works for manual exports.
Twenty-five faculty members, each with a different publication volume and a different export quirk, and you still have to reconcile the results into one flat table afterward.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the author IDs in column A, calls Semantic Scholar for each person's full publication list, and writes every paper as its own row — with a column showing which author it belongs to.
Here is the prompt for this task:
Pull the full publication list for each author ID in column A from Semantic Scholar and paste all papers into a flat Excel table — one paper per row — with a column showing which author they belong to
What You Get
- A flat table with one row per paper across all 25 faculty members.
- Columns: Author Name, Title, Year, Venue, Citation Count.
- The Author Name column carries the faculty member's name from your roster so you can filter or pivot by individual.
- Citation Count is numeric — your sort-by-impact formula runs on the full table immediately.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some author IDs in column A are blank because those faculty members haven't been looked up yet
For rows in column A where the author ID is missing, search Semantic Scholar by the faculty name in column B to find the correct author ID, fill it into column A, then fetch all papers for the completed list and write them as a flat table — one paper per row — with an Author column
You only want papers published in the last five years
For each Semantic Scholar author ID in column A, fetch papers published from 2021 onward, and write title, year, venue, and citation count as a flat table with an Author column showing who each paper belongs to
Two faculty members share the same name and you need to confirm the right author ID before pulling papers
For each author ID in column A, return the author name and total paper count from Semantic Scholar into columns C and D so I can verify the IDs are correct before pulling the full publication lists
Fetch publications, filter to high-impact, and flag co-authored papers in one prompt
For each Semantic Scholar author ID in column A, fetch all papers published since 2020, filter to those with at least 25 citations, write each to a flat table with title, year, venue, citation count, and author name, and mark papers with more than 3 co-authors as Collaborative in a Tags column
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook where column A holds faculty Semantic Scholar author IDs. Ask SheetXAI to pull every paper into a flat table — and deliver the provost's report without a single manual export.
See also: Enrich a Researcher Roster With Author Metrics and the Semantic Scholar hub overview.