The Scenario
You're three days into building an evidence base for a consulting deliverable and the research lead just sent a message: the client wants citations. Not summaries — actual paper titles, authors, publication years, and citation counts, one row per topic.
You have 45 keywords in column A of your Excel workbook. You've been staring at them since yesterday.
The bad version:
- Open Google Scholar, paste keyword one, find the top paper, manually copy the title into column B, the author list into column C, the citation count into column D
- Repeat for each of the 45 rows, keeping track of which worksheet you're in and which row you left off on
- Realize halfway through that the citation counts are formatted inconsistently and go back to fix the earlier rows before the report is due
Nobody hired you to move data from a browser to a spreadsheet. The client is paying for the analysis, and right now the analysis is waiting behind 44 more copy-paste cycles.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads column A, talks to Serply's Google Scholar API for each term, and writes the results back without you touching a single cell manually.
For each topic in column A, search Google Scholar via Serply and fill in the top 3 paper titles, authors, and citation counts into columns B through G
What You Get
- Columns B, C, D — title, author list, and citation count for the top Scholar result per topic
- Columns E, F, G — the same fields for the second and third results
- Rows where no papers were found return "No results" so you know immediately which terms need a different query
- Citation counts come back as integers — no reformatting needed
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The keywords are too broad and Scholar returns off-topic papers
For each topic in column A, search Google Scholar via Serply but only include results where the title contains at least one word from column B, and write matching titles, authors, and citation counts into columns C through E
Some topics have a specific year range I need to filter by
For each topic in column A, search Google Scholar via Serply for papers published between 2018 and 2024, and write the top paper title, first author, year, and citation count into columns B, C, D, and E
I need to join the Scholar results with a category label from a second worksheet
Look up each keyword from column A on the "Topics" worksheet using Serply Scholar, then write the top paper title and citation count into columns B and C on the "Topics" sheet, and copy the category label from column B of the "Categories" worksheet into column D based on matching keyword
Pull full evidence sets, rank by citation count, and flag gaps in one pass
For each topic in column A, search Google Scholar via Serply and pull the top 5 results; write title, authors, year, and citation count into columns B through Q; then add a column R that flags any topic where the highest citation count is below 50 as "Low evidence"
One prompt handles the fetch, the ranking, and the gap flag — no intermediate cleanup step required.
Try It
Open an Excel workbook with your research keywords in column A and get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI. Ask it to search Google Scholar via Serply for each term and write back titles and citation counts. Then check out enriching location data with Serply Maps or browse the full Serply integration overview.