Map the Downstream Citation Network of Landmark Papers in a Google Sheet With Semantic Scholar

The Scenario

A policy analyst at a think tank has five landmark climate-policy papers that form the empirical backbone of an upcoming briefing document. The question from the policy director is simple: who is building on this work? Which researchers, in which venues, are citing these papers — and how recently? The answer is somewhere in Semantic Scholar. Getting it into a sheet is not.

The bad version:

Open the Semantic Scholar page for paper 1, scroll to the Cited By section, see 340 citing papers, scroll through the first page, copy the visible titles and years by hand.
Realize the Cited By list only shows 20 papers per page and has 17 pages. The export option isn't where you expected it.
By the time you've manually reconstructed 60 citing papers across the first two source papers, you've been at this for two hours and the briefing draft deadline is tomorrow morning.

The citation network is the evidence. The work is interpreting it — not reassembling it from a web interface one scroll at a time.

The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI

SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the paper IDs in column A, calls Semantic Scholar's citations endpoint for each one, and writes every citing paper as its own row — with the source paper clearly labeled.

Here is the prompt for this task:

For each paper ID in column A, retrieve all papers that cite it from Semantic Scholar and write the citing paper's title, year, venue, and citation count to a sheet called CitationNetwork

What You Get

A CitationNetwork sheet with one row per citing paper across all five source papers.
Columns: Source Paper ID, Citing Paper Title, Year, Venue, Citation Count.
Papers that cite multiple source papers appear once per source — so your intersection analysis runs cleanly.
Citation Count on each citing paper shows how much downstream traction that citing work has itself.

What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready

Column A contains DOIs, not Semantic Scholar IDs

For each DOI in column A, resolve it to a Semantic Scholar paper ID, then pull all citing papers and write their title, year, venue, and citation count to the CitationNetwork sheet with a column showing the source DOI

You only want citing papers from the last three years

For each paper ID in column A, fetch all citing papers from Semantic Scholar published from 2023 onward, and write title, year, venue, and citation count to the CitationNetwork sheet with a Source Paper column

You need to identify which citing papers also appear in a separate watchlist

After pulling all citing papers into the CitationNetwork sheet for each paper ID in column A, check each citing paper title against the Watchlist sheet column A and mark matches with a flag in a column called On Watchlist

Resolve IDs, pull citations, filter by year, and rank by downstream impact in one shot

For each paper ID in column A, fetch all citing papers from Semantic Scholar published since 2021, filter to those with at least 5 citations themselves, write title, year, venue, citation count, and source paper ID to the CitationNetwork sheet, and sort by citation count descending so the highest-impact citing papers appear first

The cleanup and the analysis happen in a single pass — no intermediate steps.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet holding the paper IDs of your landmark sources. Ask SheetXAI to map the full citation network into a flat table — and have the downstream-impact data ready for the briefing draft before the deadline.