# meld402 Academic Paper Search

> meld402 Academic Paper Search is a paid API for AI agents from meld402.vercel.app, paid per call via x402, $0.15/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-09-14).

Searches academic literature by query and optional year range, returning ranked papers with titles, authors, citations, and snippets aggregated via SerpApi — paid per call over x402.

## Facts

- Endpoint: POST https://meld402.vercel.app/api/web/academic
- Price: $0.15/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-09-14
- Activations on Zero: 0
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/meld402-academic-paper-search-619a9878
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_z8DLF4a60XI1GqmrrL8j-

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability meld402-academic-paper-search-619a9878 -d '<json body>'
```

Example prompt: Search for the top 10 academic papers on transformer attention mechanisms published between 2017 and 2023, and give me the titles, authors, citation counts, and links.

## When to prefer this

Choose this endpoint when an AI agent needs structured, citation-rich academic paper metadata from a stable schema without managing individual SerpApi credentials. Ideal for literature review automation, research assistant workflows, or any agent task requiring ranked scholarly results with citation counts. Prefer over raw SerpApi calls when a single USDC micropayment per query (via x402 on Base) is acceptable and the agent needs a normalized, multi-source-ready response format.

## Known failure modes

- Empty query string returns validation error
- Query exceeds 500 characters returns schema validation error
- Insufficient USDC balance / failed x402 payment returns 402 Payment Required
- SerpApi upstream unavailable causes degraded or empty results with source listed in degraded array
- num outside 1-20 range returns schema validation error
- year_from greater than year_to may return zero results or unexpected ordering

## How this service works

14 paid data endpoints for autonomous agents and developers. Covers crypto intelligence (token, chain, Solana, gas), markets (FX, market pulse), location (weather), and research (news, brief). Each route aggregates multiple public sources into one stable schema with a single USDC payment over x402 on Base.

## Output

Returns a JSON object with a list of ranked papers (up to 20), each containing title, authors array, publication year, citation count, abstract snippet, source URL, and position. Also includes total_results count, query echo, data sources used (SerpApi), timestamp, and attribution string.

## Request schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object",
 "properties": {
  "num": {
   "type": "integer",
   "default": 10,
   "maximum": 20,
   "minimum": 1,
   "description": "Number of papers"
  },
  "query": {
   "type": "string",
   "maxLength": 500,
   "minLength": 1,
   "description": "Academic search query"
  },
  "year_to": {
   "type": "integer",
   "maximum": 2100,
   "minimum": 1900,
   "description": "Latest publication year"
  },
  "year_from": {
   "type": "integer",
   "maximum": 2100,
   "minimum": 1900,
   "description": "Earliest publication year"
  }
 }
}
```

## Response schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "json",
 "example": {
  "data": {
   "query": "transformer architecture attention mechanism",
   "papers": [
    {
     "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762",
     "year": 2017,
     "title": "Attention Is All You Need",
     "authors": [
      "Vaswani",
      "Shazeer",
      "Parmar"
     ],
     "snippet": "We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer...",
     "position": 1,
     "citations": 125000
    },
    {
     "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805",
     "year": 2019,
     "title": "BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers",
     "authors": [
      "Devlin",
      "Chang",
      "Lee"
     ],
     "snippet": "We introduce BERT, a method for pre-training deep bidirectional...",
     "position": 2,
     "citations": 85000
    }
   ],
   "total_results": 45000
  },
  "meta": {
   "as_of": "2026-08-24T00:00:00.000Z",
   "sources": [
    "serpapi"
   ],
   "degraded": [],
   "attribution": [
    "Search data by SerpApi (serpapi.com)"
   ]
  }
 }
}
```

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/meld402-academic-paper-search-619a9878/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from meld402.vercel.app](https://www.zero.xyz/host/meld402.vercel.app/llms.txt)