Keeping up

Recipes for following a field after the first search: saved searches that report what is new, and papers related to one you already trust.

• Save a search
• Check every watch
• Run it every morning
• New papers as JSON, for a notification
• Papers related to one you like
• More related papers, with a Semantic Scholar key
• Remove a watch

Save a search

mosaic watch add "hall thruster anomalous transport" --name hall-transport
mosaic watch add "hall thruster" --name hall-arxiv --source arxiv --field title --year 2024-2026

--name is required and unique. The options are those of search: --source, --year, --author, --journal, --field, --raw-query, --oa-only, and --max (-m, 25 per source by default). The papers the search returns today become the baseline, so the first run reports nothing. Tutorial: following a field; guide: Watches.

Check every watch

mosaic watch run                    # all watches
mosaic watch run hall-transport     # only the ones you name
mosaic watch list                   # name, query, papers seen, last run

A paper is new when this watch has never returned it, even if another search already put it in the cache. An unknown watch name exits with status 1.

Run it every morning

# crontab -e
0 7 * * *  mosaic watch run --download >> ~/watch.log 2>&1

--download (-d) fetches the PDFs of the new papers, as mosaic get would: set mosaic config --unpaywall-email first, or open copies are not looked up.

New papers as JSON, for a notification

mosaic watch run --json | jq -r '.watches[] | "\(.name): \(.new | length) new"'

The document is {"status": "ok", "watches": [...]}; each watch has name, query, total, new (the new papers, with all their fields and uid), downloaded and errors. A watch whose source needs a missing key carries an error field instead. Agents and Claude Code has the full shape.

Papers related to one you like

mosaic similar 10.1063/1.4972269
mosaic similar arxiv:2304.06563 --max 25 --sort citations --oa-only
mosaic similar 10.1063/1.4972269 --output related.bib

similar takes a DOI or arxiv:<id> and returns the works OpenAlex relates to it. --sort, --oa-only, --pdf-only, --download, --output, --json, --zotero and --obsidian behave as in search. Guide: Similar papers.

More related papers, with a Semantic Scholar key

mosaic config --ss-key YOUR_KEY
mosaic similar 10.1063/1.4972269

With a key, similar also asks Semantic Scholar's recommendation service and merges both lists. The key is free from Semantic Scholar and also lifts the shared rate limit of the search source.

Remove a watch

mosaic watch remove hall-arxiv

The watch and its list of seen papers are deleted; the papers stay in the cache.