Search the literature
Describe what you want to understand. PaperSeek prepares source-specific queries and shows how the search develops.
Workspace navigation
Search settings, Run progress, and Results are separate views within Search. Model defaults live in the standalone settings page, opened from the sidebar footer; source, scope, and budget remain in the draft. Stop is available in the run header across views. Switching views does not restart the run.
Write a focused question
Name the subject and relationship you care about. Add a method, population, period, or context when essential.
Broad: “Open-source software.”
Focused: “How do funding mechanisms affect the long-term maintenance of open-source software?”
Use English or Chinese natural language; no hand-written Boolean query is required. The question field accepts up to 10,000 characters.
Choose the source and scope
A run starts from one selected source. Multiple retrieval paths do not mean that all eight sources are queried in the same run.
OpenAlex, arXiv, and WoS offer source-specific field filters. Other sources use a research-field hint while planning queries. A hint is not a database-level hard filter.
OpenAlex citation expansion adds references and citing works within a budget. It introduces additional requests and can take longer.
Set a budget
| Interface | API / CLI | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Auto | — | Let PaperSeek choose the search budget |
| Fast | fast | Smaller retrieval and scoring budget |
| Balanced | medium | Broader coverage and ranking |
| Deep | high | More candidates and citation exploration |
| Maximum | max | Largest bounded search budget |
These are work limits, not promises of a paper count or completion time. Larger budgets can increase latency and cost. A focused question may help more than choosing Maximum.
Follow the four stages
- Intent and queries: understand the scope and prepare the strategy.
- Query iteration: test and refine queries using source feedback.
- Retrieval and ranking: collect candidates, optionally expand citations, apply preliminary ranking, and evaluate relevance.
- Results: prepare the reading list and exports.
The UI shows stage status and details, rather than a raw terminal log.
Understand the counts
A source may report thousands of hits while only one page has been downloaded. Source hits, retrieved candidates, and final results describe different sets.
PaperSeek can narrow an overly broad query before fetching a candidate pool. Repeated or unproductive rewrites stop, and selection can return to a better recorded query rather than automatically using the last rewrite. Candidate pools remain bounded; the output is not an exhaustive corpus.
Stop or reconnect
Use Stop to request cancellation. Cancelling can remain briefly while in-flight work finishes.
Refreshing a persisted run reconnects to saved state. A network reconnect is not a new search. Retrying a finished or cancelled run starts new work; it does not reopen the old execution.
Online queueing is covered in the online overview; anonymous sessions in Data & privacy.