The Scenario
You're three years into a PhD in computational biology. Your advisor handed you a reading list of 80 papers six weeks ago with the note "get through these before we talk about your lit review." You got through them. Now you need to actually write the lit review — and that means knowing citation counts (to signal significance), DOIs (for proper referencing), and first-author names (for in-text citation format).
Column A has 80 paper titles. Every piece of metadata you need is sitting in Google Scholar. The problem is looking up 80 papers one at a time on Scholar, clicking into each one, reading the citation count, finding the DOI, noting the first author, and pasting it all into the sheet.
The bad version:
- Search the first title on Google Scholar. Hope that the exact title returns the right paper and not a similarly named one. Click through to verify. Read the citation count (it's displayed as "Cited by 243"). Copy "243." Find the DOI — it's sometimes listed, sometimes behind a publisher link you have to follow. Note the first author from the result listing. Paste all three into columns B, C, and D. Repeat 79 more times.
- After 15 papers you find two with the same title from different years by different groups. You've been entering data for the wrong one.
- The DOI is missing for 12 papers because they're preprints. Now you have a partial table with inconsistent data.
Your advisor is not waiting on your metadata. Your lit review is waiting on your metadata.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the paper titles in column A, queries Composio Search's Google Scholar tool for each one, and writes citation counts, first author names, and DOIs into columns B, C, and D.
Search Google Scholar for each paper title in column A and fill in the citation count into column B, the first author name into column C, and the DOI into column D. If no DOI is available, write 'No DOI' in column D.
All 80 papers, three fields each, in one pass.
What You Get
- Column B: Citation count as a number
- Column C: First author last name and initials
- Column D: DOI in standard format, or 'No DOI' for preprints and unreachable papers
- Any title that returns multiple close matches gets the most-cited result; ambiguous cases are flagged
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some titles are truncated or slightly wrong
You copied the titles quickly and some are cut off mid-word or have extra characters.
Search Google Scholar for each paper title in column A using a fuzzy match — if the exact title returns no results, try the first 8 words of the title. Write the best matching citation count into column B and the matched full title into column E for verification.
You want to know whether a free PDF is available
You don't have institutional access for all journals and need to prioritize what to request through interlibrary loan.
For each paper in my reading list in column A, find whether a free PDF link is available on Scholar and write the URL into column E, or write 'No PDF' if none is found.
Some papers have changed titles since the list was made
You have the original working titles but some were updated before publication.
Search Google Scholar for each paper title in column A. If no exact match is found, search for papers by the same first author listed in column C and return the closest matching title published within 2 years of the date in column F. Write the confirmed title into column G.
Kill chain: search all papers, get metadata, check PDF access, flag low-citation entries
Search Google Scholar for each paper in column A. Write citation count into column B, first author into column C, DOI into column D, and free PDF URL or 'No PDF' into column E. Then flag any paper with fewer than 10 citations in column F as 'Low Citation Count' so you can decide whether to deprioritize it in the lit review.
One prompt gets the metadata, checks access, and flags what might not be worth deep coverage.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your reading list sheet. Ask it to fetch citation counts, DOIs, and PDF links for every paper in column A. See also: Build an SEC EDGAR Filing Tracker Sheet With Composio Search or the Composio Search hub.