citation-mapping

Citation Mapping

This skill traces both directions of a paper's citation network — backward (the references it cites) and forward (the works that cite it) — from Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex via the Scholarly Access MCP. It is metadata-only: it maps the graph, it does not retrieve full text.

When to use

• You want to see what a paper cites (its reference list / backward edges).
• You want to see who cites a paper (its citing works / forward "cited-by" edges).
• You want to expand outward from a seed paper to build a small literature network.
• You want to identify influential or highly-connected works around a topic before doing a full review.

Do NOT use this skill to fetch PDFs or full text — use the OA-PDF tools of the Scholarly Access MCP for that. This skill stops at the metadata graph.

The MCP tools it uses

The tools it relies on:

• paper_resolve(identifier) — resolve a DOI, PMID, arXiv id, or title to canonical metadata and normalized ids (doi, pmid, arxiv, openalex) with a confidence score. Use this first to pin down the seed paper.
• paper_citation_graph(identifier|doi, limit) — return the references and citing works for a paper, sourced from Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex. This is the core tool of the skill.
• paper_batch_resolve(identifiers[]) — optional, to enrich a list of neighbor ids (references or citing works) with metadata and access status in one call.

Workflow steps

1. Resolve the seed paper with paper_resolve(identifier). Confirm the title and confidence look right; capture the normalized ids (prefer the DOI or OpenAlex id for the next step).

Concrete examples

Limitations

Tested invocation