The Scenario
A research librarian at a university is building a literature database for a multi-PI grant proposal. She has 90 paper topics in column A — each representing a research thread the proposal reviewers will want to see supported by prior academic work. The grant submission window closes in 11 days.
The bad version:
- Open Google Scholar, search topic 1, find the most-cited relevant paper, copy the title, authors, journal, year, and citation count into five columns
- Search topic 2, notice that Scholar's interface changes the way author names are formatted depending on whether the author has a Scholar profile, so your data is inconsistent between rows
- Work through 30 topics before the end of the day, realizing the remaining 60 will require another full session, and that citation counts will have drifted between your first and last entry because Scholar updates in real time
Grant reviewers read literature databases for completeness. A database populated over multiple days with inconsistent formatting is a liability, not an asset.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the topic list in column A, calls SerpApi's Google Scholar endpoint for each one, and writes the top paper result back — all 90 rows, in one consistent pass. One prompt.
For each topic in column A, search Google Scholar via SerpApi and fill in the top result's title, authors, journal, year, and citation count into columns B through F
What You Get
- Column B receives the paper title
- Column C receives the author list as returned by Scholar
- Column D receives the journal or publication venue name
- Column E receives the publication year
- Column F receives the citation count at time of pull
- Topics with no Scholar results get a note in column G rather than an empty row that reads as a missed entry
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some topics in column A are too broad and return review articles, not primary research
For each topic in column A, search Google Scholar via SerpApi, skip any result whose title contains the word "review" or "meta-analysis," and return the top primary research paper title, authors, year, and citation count into columns B through E
You also need the PDF link where available
For each topic in column A, search Google Scholar via SerpApi and write the top result's title, PDF link (if available), and total citations into columns B, C, and D; write "no PDF" in column C where no direct link is returned
You want results sorted by citation count, not Scholar's default ranking
For each topic in column A, retrieve the top 3 Google Scholar results via SerpApi, sort them by citation count descending, and write the title, authors, and citation count for the highest-cited result into columns B, C, and D
Full literature pull with gap flagging in one prompt
Search Google Scholar via SerpApi for each topic in column A, write the top result's title, authors, journal, year, and citation count into columns B through F, and flag in column G any topic where the top result has fewer than 50 citations or was published before 2010
The quality flags and the citation pull happen in the same pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your literature tracking sheet before the grant deadline, then ask SheetXAI to pull Google Scholar results for every research topic. Also see the spoke on checking Google Patents for IP landscape data, or the hub overview of all SerpApi workflows.