---
title: "V1 Find Citations About"
method: GET
path: "/v1/papers/{arxiv_id}/citations/about"
tags: ["v1"]
---

# V1 Find Citations About

`GET /v1/papers/{arxiv_id}/citations/about`

## Request

- Base URL: `https://api.scholarfeed.org` (the document declares no server; this is the origin it was published from)
- URL: `https://api.scholarfeed.org/v1/papers/{arxiv_id}/citations/about`
- Auth: HTTP bearer

Find papers in the citation graph of `arxiv_id` whose content matches `query`.

Combines the citation graph (paper_citations) with semantic search (Gemini
RETRIEVAL_QUERY embedding vs. paper RETRIEVAL_DOCUMENT embeddings) to answer
questions like "find papers citing X that talk about Y".

Algorithm:
  1. Resolve source paper UUID from arxiv_id.
  2. Embed `query` via Gemini (cached, 15-min TTL).
  3. Take the top 2000 citation neighbours by rank_score (impact-weighted).
  4. Re-rank that pool by cosine similarity to the query embedding.
  5. Return the top `limit` with `similarity_score` per paper.

Similarity is doc-doc cosine between RETRIEVAL_QUERY and RETRIEVAL_DOCUMENT
spaces — relevant matches typically score ~0.55–0.75 (not 0.85+ like
doc-doc). Results are returned ranked, with no hard threshold; callers can
filter on `similarity_score` if they want a floor.

Rate limit: 20/minute per API key.

## Path parameters

- `arxiv_id` string, required

## Query parameters

- `query` string, required: Natural-language topic query — finds citations whose content matches this query
- `direction` string: 'citing' = papers this paper cites; 'cited_by' = papers that cite this paper
- `limit` integer
- `fields` string, nullable: Comma-separated list of fields to return. If omitted, returns the lean 12-field default unless verbose=true.
- `verbose` boolean: If true, returns the full 28-field paper shape. Default false returns the lean set.
- `exclude_ids` string, nullable: Comma-separated arXiv IDs to exclude from results (max 100)

## Response `200`

Successful Response

- object

## Other responses

- `422`: Validation Error

---

[API](https://skmtc.dev/scholarfeed/apis/scholar-feed-api.md) · [All operations](https://skmtc.dev/scholarfeed/apis/scholar-feed-api/llms.txt) · [OpenAPI document](https://skmtc.dev/scholarfeed/apis/scholar-feed-api/revisions/fc3200d27505?raw)