Introduction

The core philosophy of DeepSeek Harness (DSH) is “everything is a plugin.” When agents or developers need to process academic literature, they often face low cross-data-source retrieval efficiency, difficulty unifying citation formats, and cumbersome bulk extraction of BibTeX data. flan246/dsh-lit-search aims to solve these pain points by integrating the capabilities of Crossref, OpenAlex, and Semantic Scholar, providing a unified command-line interface and DSH toolset.

Plugin Positioning

This is an integrated academic literature toolkit that supports three forms: DSH plugin, standalone CLI, and Agent Skill. It primarily serves developers who need to build academic research agents, write papers, or manage literature.

Core Features

  1. Merged Search: Query Crossref, OpenAlex, and Semantic Scholar simultaneously, deduplicate by DOI, and return titles, authors, years, journals, and citation counts. Supports filtering by year with --from/--to, or sorting by citation count, date, or relevance.
  2. Citation Formatting: Supports the GB/T 7714 standard commonly used in Chinese papers by default, and also supports GB/T 7714 numeric format (such as [1]-style), APA, and BibTeX.
  3. Batch BibTeX Generation: Generate a merged .bib file for a set of DOIs, with failed entries listed separately.
  4. Related Works: Retrieve related papers for a specified DOI based on OpenAlex’s related_works interface.

Installation and Enablement

Install the plugin through the official directory:

dsh plugin add dsh-lit-search

After installation, DSH registers four tools: lit_search, lit_cite, lit_bib, and lit_related.

Typical Usage

After successful installation, tools can be invoked directly via the command line or used in an Agent with the tool names above. Typical CLI usage is as follows:

# Search papers and limit the number of results
npx dsh-lit-search search "attention is all you need" -n 5

# Search papers from 2024 onward and sort by date
npx dsh-lit-search search "moe" --from 2024 --sort date

# Generate a BibTeX-format citation
npx dsh-lit-search cite 10.1038/nature14539 -s bibtex

# Generate a GB/T 7714 numeric-format citation (suitable for Chinese papers)
npx dsh-lit-search cite 10.1038/nature14539 -s gbt7714-numeric

# Generate a batch BibTeX file
npx dsh-lit-search bib 10.1038/nature14539 10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762

# Retrieve related papers
npx dsh-lit-search related 10.1038/nature14539 -n 5

All commands output human-readable text by default. If machine-readable output is required, add --json before the subcommand (for example, npx dsh-lit-search --json search "transformers").

Applicable Scenarios and Notes

  • Data Sources: All APIs are free public APIs and do not require API keys.
  • Network Layer: HTTP requests have a 10-second timeout. If a 5xx or network error occurs, the request is retried once. The User-Agent is set to a polite mailto: format.
  • Error Handling: The program exit codes are defined as follows: 0 indicates success, 1 indicates a business logic error, and 2 indicates a usage error.
  • Security Notice: The plugin runs with the permissions of the current process. Confirm the source code content and license (MIT) before use.

Conclusion

For developers who need to build academic research agents or handle paper citations, dsh-lit-search provides a lightweight, configuration-free solution. More technical details and source code can be found in its GitHub repository.