opencode-research-papers

An opencode plugin that adds a research_papers tool. You do not type a slash command — you ask the AI naturally and it calls the tool for you.

Install. Restart. Ask for papers. It works.

Features

• No API keys needed. arXiv covers fresh preprints, OpenAlex covers broader scholarly metadata, citation counts, and open-access links.
• Smart source routing — arXiv for latest papers, OpenAlex for top_cited and trending. Both run together with duplicates merged.
• Markdown output with title, authors, date, PDF link, abstract, and citation counts where available.
• Filter by recency (latest, trending) or citation impact (top_cited).
• Narrow results to the past week, month, or year.
• strict mode uses anchor + concept-group filtering to cut down loosely matched results.
• If one source goes down or gets rate-limited, the other keeps going.
• arXiv requests are spaced 3 seconds apart to respect their public API terms.

Installation

Add this to your opencode.json:

{
  "plugin": [
    "opencode-research-papers"
  ]
}

Restart opencode. The tool registers automatically.

Updating

Opencode caches plugin packages and does not pull new versions on restart. After updating, clear the cache first:

Windows (PowerShell):

Remove-Item -Recurse -Force "$env:USERPROFILE\.cache\opencode\packages\opencode-research-papers@latest"

macOS / Linux:

rm -rf ~/.cache/opencode/packages/opencode-research-papers@latest

Then restart opencode.

Usage

This is a tool the AI calls — you do not invoke it directly. Just ask naturally:

"Find the latest papers on Image Segmentation"

"Show me trending Scene Text Recognition papers"

"Get top-cited Retinal Vessel Segmentation papers"

"Find 20 latest papers on Generative Adversarial Networks from the last month"

Configuration

Options as a tuple:

["opencode-research-papers", {
  "defaultMaxResults": 15,
  "defaultSource": "auto"
}]

| Option | Default | What it does | |--------|---------|-------------| | defaultMaxResults | 10 | How many results to return (1 to 50) | | defaultSource | "auto" | Source: auto, arxiv, or openalex |

Source routing

The auto default picks the best source for each filter:

| Filter | Primary | Fallback | |--------|---------|----------| | latest | arXiv | OpenAlex | | top_cited | OpenAlex | arXiv | | trending | OpenAlex | arXiv |

Force a single source with source: "arxiv" or source: "openalex".

Data Sources

arXiv

Fresh preprints in AI, CS, math, and physics. Direct PDF links, clean metadata, no signup required. The plugin spaces out requests to respect arXiv's public API terms.

OpenAlex

Broader scholarly search — citation counts, DOI metadata, open-access links. Works at 10 requests per second with no API key.

Error Handling

If one source is down or rate-limited, the plugin shows what the other returned and tells you which error occurred. If both fail, you get one consolidated message. Nothing crashes.

License

MIT

Roadmap

Things I might add eventually:

• GitHub paper-list repos — Find curated repository lists on a topic (e.g. scene-text-detection-recognition-papers) alongside paper results. Useful for community-maintained collections.
• Better deduplication — Title normalization is rough; something smarter could avoid showing the same paper twice.
• Synonym expansion — Query expansion for common terms (GAN → cGAN, WGAN, StyleGAN) to improve recall in strict mode.
• Semantic strict mode — Use embeddings or cross-encoder reranking instead of keyword matching for better relevance filtering.
• Citation counts for arXiv papers — Cross-reference arXiv results with OpenAlex to pull citation data.