# WebLens Scholar Search API

> WebLens Scholar Search API is a paid API for AI agents from api.weblens.dev, paid per call via x402, $0.015/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-10-15).

Searches academic and scholarly literature, returning ranked results with citation counts, publication metadata, and snippets for a given query.

## Facts

- Endpoint: POST https://api.weblens.dev/search/scholar?utm_source=zero.xyz
- Price: $0.015/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-10-15
- Activations on Zero: 0
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/weblens-scholar-search-api-7fefa43d
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_4A5m0C4heEsC2AZjmg3Y0

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 weblens-scholar-search-api-7fefa43d -d '<json body>'
```

Example prompt: Can you search scholarly literature for papers on transformer attention mechanisms and show me the top results with citation counts?

## When to prefer this

Choose this endpoint when you need structured academic search results with citation counts and publication metadata — particularly useful for literature reviews, research validation, or fact-checking scientific claims. Prefer it over general web search when scholarly provenance and citation signals matter, and when cost efficiency via caching (70% discount) is relevant for repeated queries on the same topic.

## Known failure modes

- Query too vague returns low-relevance results
- No results found for highly niche or unpublished topics
- Rate limiting or payment failure via x402 protocol returns 402 status
- Stale cached response may not reflect latest publications
- Network timeout on fresh fetch of large result sets

## How this service works

Google Scholar academic search. Returns papers with snippets, publication info, and citation counts.

## Output

Returns a JSON array of ranked scholarly results, each containing the paper URL (e.g. arXiv link), title, citation count, a text snippet, position rank, and publication info (authors, venue, year), along with a request ID and timestamp for the search.

## Request schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object",
 "properties": {
  "limit": {
   "type": "number",
   "default": 10,
   "example": 10,
   "maximum": 20,
   "minimum": 1,
   "description": "Maximum results to return"
  },
  "query": {
   "type": "string",
   "example": "x402 payment protocol",
   "maxLength": 500,
   "minLength": 1,
   "description": "Search query"
  }
 }
}
```

## Response schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "json",
 "example": {
  "query": "transformer attention mechanisms",
  "results": [
   {
    "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762",
    "title": "Attention Is All You Need",
    "citedBy": 130000,
    "snippet": "The dominant sequence transduction models...",
    "position": 1,
    "publicationInfo": "A Vaswani, N Shazeer - NeurIPS, 2017"
   }
  ],
  "requestId": "req_scholar123",
  "searchedAt": "2026-07-25T12:00:00.000Z"
 }
}
```

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/weblens-scholar-search-api-7fefa43d/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from api.weblens.dev](https://www.zero.xyz/host/api.weblens.dev/llms.txt)