---
name: firecrawl-research-index
description: Find scientific papers, follow citations, and verify claims against paper passages. Use for literature questions, related work, citing papers, references, or a question about a particular scientific paper.
---

# Paper research

Use Firecrawl's paper-index MCP tools for scientific literature, including
biomedical and arXiv papers. If a tool is deferred, discover it with the host's
tool search. Ordinary `firecrawl_search` with the research category filters web
sources; it does not query the same paper index.

- `firecrawl_research_search_papers` finds papers from a natural-language query.
  Add author, category, or date filters when the request requires them.
- `firecrawl_research_inspect_paper` retrieves canonical metadata for a known
  `paperId`. Reuse identifiers returned by search or supplied by the user.
- `firecrawl_research_related_papers` expands from `seed_ids` using the requested
  relationship: similar work, citing papers, or references. Its `intent` states
  what the related work should address.
- `firecrawl_research_read_paper` retrieves full-text passages relevant to a
  `question` about one `paperId`.

Choose the operations needed for the question; a known paper does not require
another discovery search. Verify substantive claims with relevant passages when
available. If full text is unavailable, label conclusions based on the abstract
or metadata and use `firecrawl_scrape` on an accessible source URL when helpful.

Cite paper URLs or persistent identifiers. Distinguish a paper's claims from
your synthesis and do not describe a partial search as an exhaustive review.
Respect the user's source and tool choices. Report connection or authentication
errors.