The Scenario
The grant-writing office has a roster of 120 potential collaborators for a multi-institution proposal. The lead PI needs each person's current affiliation, h-index, and total citations filled in — in the spreadsheet, not in a separate document — before the internal review call on Friday morning. You inherited the roster. The previous coordinator left no notes on how they sourced this data.
The bad version:
- Search Semantic Scholar for the first name, find the right author record among the disambiguation results (three researchers share the same name), click into the profile, copy the affiliation, copy the h-index, switch back to the sheet, paste both.
- Repeat for name 2. Realize the affiliation field on Semantic Scholar is sometimes a department name, sometimes just a university name — inconsistent across profiles.
- By name 25, you've spent two hours and have 95 rows still blank. The PI just asked if it's ready.
The problem isn't the research — it's that nobody should be spending 15 seconds per row multiplied by 120 rows to populate three columns.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the names in column A, resolves each one against Semantic Scholar's author index, and writes the affiliation, h-index, and citation count directly into the adjacent columns.
Here is the prompt for this task:
Search Semantic Scholar for each author name in column A and fill in their affiliation, h-index, and total citation count in columns B, C, and D
What You Get
- Columns B, C, and D filled for each researcher: Affiliation, H-Index, Total Citations.
- For common names with multiple matches, SheetXAI selects the most-cited author record and notes the disambiguation in a comment column if ambiguity was detected.
- Rows where no Semantic Scholar profile was found are flagged clearly rather than left blank.
- Total Citations arrives as a number — your ranking formula runs immediately.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The name column contains formatting inconsistencies — some all-caps, some with honorifics
Before searching, normalize each name in column A by converting to title case and stripping honorifics like Dr. or Prof., then look up each person on Semantic Scholar and fill in affiliation, h-index, and total citations in columns B, C, and D
You already have some Semantic Scholar author IDs and want to skip the name-resolution step for those rows
For rows in column A where column E has a Semantic Scholar author ID, use the ID directly to fetch affiliation and h-index; for rows where column E is blank, resolve by name — write results into columns B, C, and D
You need to join the enriched data against a second sheet that has institution-level tiers
After filling in affiliation, h-index, and total citations for each author in column A from Semantic Scholar, look up each affiliation against the Institutions sheet in column A and pull the tier rating from column B into column E of the Authors sheet
Disambiguate names, enrich, and flag low-h-index candidates in one shot
Search Semantic Scholar for each name in column A, select the highest-citation match for any ambiguous names, fill affiliation into column B, h-index into column C, and total citations into column D, then flag any researcher with an h-index below 5 in column E as Emerging
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet with a column of researcher names. Ask SheetXAI to pull their Semantic Scholar metrics into the adjacent columns — and have the grant proposal roster ready before Friday's call.
See also: Pull Full Publication Lists by Author ID and the Semantic Scholar hub overview.