Research Brief
Best papers on a topic with citations, plus an AI summary that only cites those papers.
Research brief on any topic in one call: the best papers from ISHOB's open-licence archive, filled with a live search of 250M+ scholarly works, each with authors, year, venue, DOI and citations; abstracts only for openly licensed papers (CC0 / public domain / CC BY / CC BY-SA), metadata and link for the rest; plus a short AI synthesis citing the papers as [n]. Checked before payment: if nothing is found anywhere the answer is a free 404 'not_covered'.
What agents use it for
- Literature review starting point
- Evidence-backed answers for research agents
- Track recent work on a topic
Parameters
| Parameter | Type | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
query | string | yes | Research question or topic |
max_papers | integer · default 5 | no | Maximum number of papers in the brief |
year_from | integer | no | Only papers published in or after this year |
include_live | boolean · default true | no | Fill with live results from open scholarly sources when the archive has fewer papers |
synthesize | boolean · default true | no | Add the AI-written brief |
Call it
{
"name": "research_brief",
"arguments": {
"query": "perovskite solar cell stability",
"max_papers": 5
}
}curl -i -X POST "https://api.ishob.com/v1/research-brief" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"query":"perovskite solar cell stability","max_papers":5}'Paid with x402: the first call returns HTTP 402 with the price; an x402 client (for example @x402/fetch or @x402/mcp) signs a USDC payment and retries. Calls that fail are not charged.
Connect the MCP server: setup for Claude, Cursor and other clients.