Research Lookup Skill

Real-time research information lookup that routes each query to the backend best suited to it, then saves the result to sources/ so every citation stays traceable.

SKILL.md is the authoritative reference for how the skill behaves. This README is a quick human-facing overview.

Backends

Backend	Speed	Best for	Key
`parallel-cli search` (default)	2–10 s	General research, market data, technical lookups, fact-checking	`PARALLEL_API_KEY`
Perplexity `sonar-pro-search`	5–15 s	Scholarly paper searches (papers, DOIs, systematic reviews)	`OPENROUTER_API_KEY`
Parallel Chat API (`core`)	60 s–5 min	Deep, exhaustive multi-source synthesis (on explicit request)	`PARALLEL_API_KEY`

Two different "Parallel" things: parallel-cli search is the fast web-search CLI (the default). The Parallel Chat API core model is a separate, slow deep-research endpoint reached only through scripts/research_lookup.py. --force-backend parallel selects the slow Chat API.

Setup

# Install the primary dependency
curl -fsSL https://parallel.ai/install.sh | bash
# or: uv tool install "parallel-web-tools[cli]"

# Authenticate / set keys
parallel-cli auth                    # or: export PARALLEL_API_KEY="..."
export OPENROUTER_API_KEY="..."      # optional, for Perplexity academic search

Usage

# Default: fast web search (save results to sources/)
mkdir -p sources
parallel-cli search "recent advances in CRISPR gene editing 2025" \
  -q "CRISPR" -q "gene editing" --json --max-results 10 \
  -o sources/research_crispr.json

# Academic paper search (Perplexity)
python scripts/research_lookup.py "find papers on CRISPR off-target effects" \
  --force-backend perplexity -o sources/papers_crispr.md

# Deep research (Parallel Chat API — slow, on request only)
python scripts/research_lookup.py "state of quantum error correction" \
  --force-backend parallel -o sources/research_qec.md

# Auto-route between the two API backends
python scripts/research_lookup.py "your query" -o sources/research_topic.md

scripts/research_lookup.py is also imported by the market-research-reports skill, so its CLI stays stable.

What you get back

parallel-cli search — JSON with title, url, publish_date, and content excerpts per result.
Perplexity / Chat API — a markdown report plus a Sources list and Additional References (DOIs, academic URLs). Add --json to research_lookup.py for structured citation objects.

Notes

Save every result to sources/ — it makes the research reproducible, recoverable after context compaction, and cheap to reuse. Check sources/ before making a new call.
When a query is about the literature, prefer highly-cited papers from top-tier venues; note citation counts and venues in-line where known. See the quality guidance in SKILL.md.
Query text is sent to api.parallel.ai and, for academic searches, to openrouter.ai.

parallel-web — the full parallel-cli toolkit (search, extract, enrichment, deep research).
citation-management — Google Scholar / PubMed search and DOI→BibTeX.
scientific-schematics — publication-quality diagrams for research documents.

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