firecrawl-research-papers

Use the firecrawl research search-papers command or the firecrawl_research_search_papers MCP tool with a semantic query. Start with one framing, then retry alternate phrasings and expand strong results with related-papers to cover the full paper family.

Use firecrawl research read-paper with the paper ID and a specific question about the method, benchmark score, affiliation, or limitation. This checks the claim inside the paper body rather than relying only on the abstract.

It covers academic papers from arXiv, university sites, and accessible ACM/IEEE pages, plus industry whitepapers, company research blogs, and technical articles. General Firecrawl search and scrape handle leaderboards and reports outside the paper index.

Yes, a FIRECRAWL_API_KEY is required for hosted Firecrawl Research access through the CLI, MCP, or equivalent tool surface. Without it, paper search, related-paper expansion, and read-paper verification cannot run.

Some PDFs may be inaccessible or fail to load, and the paper index may not include every venue. The workflow notes failed sources and distinguishes peer-reviewed work from blogs and vendor reports in the final synthesis.