Bulk Search Research Topics in Semantic Scholar From a Google Sheet

The Scenario

Your systematic review spans 15 therapeutic keywords. The committee wants the top 20 most-cited papers per keyword — title, authors, year, venue, citation count — as a flat table before Thursday's presentation. You've been staring at the same Semantic Scholar search tab for two hours, running one keyword at a time, copying rows, switching back to the sheet, pasting.

The bad version:

Run keyword 1, scan results, manually pick the top 20, copy each row's fields, switch to the sheet, paste — then reformat because the clipboard dropped the venue column.
Repeat for keyword 2. Realize keyword 3 returned a different number of visible result columns than keyword 1, so the table is already misaligned.
By keyword 8, you're not sure you're applying the citation-sort consistently. The data already disagrees with itself.

A 300-row table built this way is a liability you'll be defending in front of the committee, not a dataset you can trust.

The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI

SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the keywords in your sheet, connects to Semantic Scholar, and writes the ranked results back — handling the search logic, the field mapping, and the flat-table structure for you.

Here is the prompt for this task:

For each research topic in column A, search Semantic Scholar for the top 15 papers by citation count published after 2019, and write title, year, venue, citation count, and paper URL into new rows on a sheet called LitScan

What You Get

A sheet named LitScan with one row per paper, populated from the top of column A down through every keyword.
Columns: Keyword (the source from column A), Title, Year, Venue, Citation Count, Paper URL.
Citation Count arrives as a number, not a string — your sort and filter formulas work immediately.
Papers that returned fewer than 15 results for a keyword are clearly bounded — no silent gaps in the middle of the table.

What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready

The keywords in column A include trailing whitespace and mixed capitalization

Before searching, clean each keyword in column A — trim whitespace and normalize to title case — then run the Semantic Scholar search for each and write results to LitScan

You need to filter by field of study, not just by date

For each keyword in column A, search Semantic Scholar filtered to the Neuroscience field of study, pull the top 10 results by citation count published after 2020, and write title, year, venue, and citation count into LitScan

Your keyword list spans two sheets and you need results merged

Combine keywords from column A on Sheet1 and column A on Sheet2 into a single deduplicated list, search Semantic Scholar for the top 15 papers by citation count for each, and write all results to LitScan with a Keyword column showing the source

Clean duplicates, filter by year, and search in one pass

Deduplicate the keywords in column A, drop any published before 2018, search Semantic Scholar for each remaining keyword for the top 10 papers by citation count, and write title, year, venue, citation count, and paper URL to LitScan — sorted by citation count descending

One prompt handles the prep work and the search together. There's no reason to run them as separate steps.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet with a column of research keywords. Ask SheetXAI to pull Semantic Scholar results for each one into a flat LitScan table — and have a structured literature dataset ready before your next committee meeting.