Scholar results API

How it works

The scholar endpoint returns academic search results from a third-party search provider: titles, links, a snippet, publication details, year, citation count and a PDF link when one is available.

It is useful when an agent needs citations rather than general web pages, for example to back up a claim or to start a literature review. Each call costs $0.004 and returns up to 20 results.

Results are returned in rank order with a position field, so you can keep the top few for a prompt or store them all. Combine scholar with news and web search to compare what the academic record says with recent coverage, or pass a URL to /api/v1/extract to pull an abstract or full text into your pipeline. Because each call is priced on its own, a literature-review agent can run dozens of narrow queries and pay only for what it uses, with no plan to pick in advance and nothing to cancel later.

Request and response: /api/v1/scholar

POST /api/v1/scholar costs $0.004 per call. Send the parameters as a JSON body.

curl -X POST https://x402serps.com/api/v1/scholar \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -H "X-Trial: 1" \
  -d '{"q":"retrieval augmented generation","num":10}'

Example response (values shortened; field names are exactly what the API returns):

{
  "query": "retrieval augmented generation",
  "provider": "primary",
  "results": [
    {
      "position": 1,
      "title": "Retrieval-augmented generation for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.11401",
      "snippet": "Large pre-trained language models have been shown to store factual knowledge...",
      "publicationInfo": "P Lewis, E Perez, A Piktus... - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2020",
      "year": 2020,
      "citedBy": 9000,
      "pdfUrl": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.11401"
    }
  ]
}

Use cases

• Citation finding. Give a writing agent real papers to cite.
• Literature reviews. Collect the most cited work on a topic, then extract the PDFs.
• Fact checking. Check whether a claim has academic support.
• Research dashboards. Track new papers on a topic on a schedule.

Paying for calls

Every call is priced on its own. With x402, an unpaid request returns HTTP 402 with the exact amount, asset and recipient for USDC on Base or Solana; your client signs a payment and repeats the same request, and results come back once the payment settles. No account or API key is involved. If you would rather pay by card, buy a credit pack on the pricing page and send Authorization: Bearer xs_.... Cached repeat queries cost half for credit keys, and failed calls are not charged. Paid calls have no per-minute rate limit.

FAQ