CLI Features

Three commands.
Full pipeline.

Search the research graph, map industry signals, and export verified contacts. All from your terminal, in seconds.

01 / Search

Search the research graph

Query 250M+ papers across every discipline. Filter by field, institution, funding source, H-index, publication recency, and more.

— Full-text search across paper titles, abstracts, and keywords
— Filter by active NIH, NSF, and international grant funding
— Scope to specific institutions, countries, or departments
— H-index and citation count thresholds for quality filtering

$ selltoscientists search "CRISPR therapeutics" --grants NIH --min-hindex 20

Querying OpenAlex + NIH Reporter...
124 researchers matched

01  Dr. Sarah Chen · Stanford · H-index: 32
      CRISPR gene editing · NIH R01 · $2.1M
02  Prof. James Liu · MIT · H-index: 41
      Gene therapy delivery · NIH R01 · $1.8M

02 / Map

Map industry signals

Surface researchers with one foot in industry. Detect patent holders, startup founders, SAB members, and recent academia-to-industry transitions.

— Patent filing detection via USPTO cross-reference
— Startup affiliation and SAB membership signals
— Industry co-authorship tracking across publications
— Co-author network mapping for community discovery

$ selltoscientists map --field "CRISPR" --signals patents,startups

Mapping industry bridge signals...
38 researchers with industry ties found

SIGNAL            COUNT
Patent holders    22
Startup SAB       14
Industry funded   31
Co-authors (ind)  18

03 / Export

Export verified contacts

Get institutional emails verified against recent publications. Export to CSV, JSON, or pipe directly to your CRM.

— Email verification against publications from last 24 months
— Confidence scoring: high, likely, or unverified
— CSV, JSON, and JSONL output formats
— ORCID, H-index, grants, and citations included per record

$ selltoscientists export --list "crispr-leads" --format csv

Verifying emails against recent publications...
Exported 124 contacts to crispr-leads.csv

Fields: name, email, institution, h_index,
        grants, patents, industry_signals
Email confidence: 89% high, 8% likely, 3% unverified

Data Sources

OpenAlex

Open catalog of 250M+ scholarly works, 100M+ authors, and their institutional affiliations. Updated weekly from Crossref, PubMed, ORCID, and institutional repositories. The backbone of Sell to Scientists's research graph.

ORCID

20M+ unique researcher identifiers linking publications, grants, and employment history. Used to disambiguate researchers with common names and track institutional transitions.

PubMed

36M+ biomedical and life sciences citations from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Essential for pharma/biotech prospecting with MeSH term search.

NIH Reporter

Active and historical grant data from the National Institutes of Health. R01 grants, funding amounts, project abstracts, and PI details. Identifies researchers with active budgets to spend.

Semantic Scholar

AI-powered academic search from the Allen Institute for AI. Provides citation contexts, influential citations, and paper-level impact metrics beyond raw citation count.

USPTO

US patent filings and grants cross-referenced against academic authors. Surfaces researchers who have commercialized their work — the strongest industry bridge signal.

Why Not Existing Tools

Built for the market B2B tools miss.

70% of academic researchers have no LinkedIn presence. Those who do rarely list grants, H-index, or current institutional affiliations. Sales Navigator was built for corporate prospecting — university PIs, postdocs, and lab managers are invisible to it.

ZoomInfo / Apollo

B2B contact databases index corporate HR systems. They track job titles, org charts, and corporate email addresses. Academic researchers — funded by grants, employed by universities, publishing under institutional domains — simply don't appear. Try searching for any NIH-funded PI. They're not there.

Scopus / Web of Science

Citation databases designed for literature review, not B2B prospecting. No verified contact data. No industry bridge signals. No CRM-ready export. You can find a researcher's h-index but not their email, grant funding, or whether they've filed a patent.

Manual research (spreadsheets)

The status quo: cross-referencing PubMed, Google Scholar, ORCID, university faculty pages, and LinkedIn in 47 browser tabs. Building one KOL list takes 2-3 weeks. Sell to Scientists does it in minutes — and the data doesn't go stale because it's pulled from authoritative sources at query time.

How It Works

Six sources, one graph.

Step 1

Aggregate

Pull data from OpenAlex, ORCID, PubMed, NIH Reporter, Semantic Scholar, and USPTO. Deduplicate researchers using ORCID identifiers and fuzzy name matching. Build a unified research graph with publications, grants, citations, and patents linked to each researcher.

Step 2

Detect signals

Layer proprietary signal detection on top of the graph. Cross-reference patent filings with author records. Identify startup affiliations from co-authorship patterns. Flag industry-funded grants and consulting relationships. Score each researcher's industry readiness.

Step 3

Verify contacts

Extract institutional email addresses from recent publications (last 24 months). Cross-reference with university directory patterns. Assign confidence scores: high (verified in recent pub), likely (pattern match), unverified. Target: 85%+ deliverability on high-confidence contacts.

The entire pipeline runs at query time. No stale database — every search pulls fresh data from authoritative sources. Results are cached for the session, so subsequent queries on the same researchers are instant.

Three commands.Full pipeline.