| name | openalex |
| description | Search scholarly works through OpenAlex's public works search API with open-access URL fallback. |
| version | 1 |
| languages | ["en","mixed"] |
| methods | [{"id":"api_search","impl":"methods/api_search.py","requires":[],"rate_limit":{"per_min":30,"per_hour":500}}] |
| fallback_chain | ["api_search"] |
| when_to_use | {"query_languages":["en","mixed"],"query_types":["academic-paper","citation","survey","research"],"domain_hints":["academia","literature-review","scholarly-search","citations"]} |
| quality_hint | {"typical_yield":"high","chinese_native":false} |
| layer | leaf |
| domains | ["academic"] |
| scenarios | ["metadata-search","citation-graph"] |
| model_tier | Fast |
| experience_digest | experience.md |
Overview
OpenAlex provides broad scholarly metadata coverage across papers, preprints, chapters, and other research outputs through a free public API. It is useful when the query needs paper titles, authors, abstracts, citation counts, and open-access landing pages across a much larger corpus than a single publisher or preprint server.
When to Choose It
- Choose it for paper discovery, survey-building, citation-oriented lookup, and research-heavy English or mixed-language queries.
- Choose it when open-access landing pages or DOI links are valuable because the planner may need a direct path from metadata to readable paper pages.
- Choose it when the search should cover both preprints and published literature rather than only one repository.
How To Search
api_search - Calls https://api.openalex.org/works with the search query parameter and per-page=10, then maps results entries into normalized evidence.
api_search - Reconstructs abstract text from OpenAlex's positional abstract_inverted_index representation before building snippet and content fields.
api_search - Resolves evidence URLs in priority order: best_oa_location.landing_page_url, then doi, then the OpenAlex id fallback.
Known Quirks
- Abstracts are returned as an inverted index rather than plain prose, so the channel reconstructs them into normal text before truncation.
- Use OpenAlex's
search query parameter for keyword search, not filter, which is for metadata filtering syntax.
- OpenAlex is rate-limited to roughly 10 requests per second without auth, and the single-call-per-subquery pattern here stays well under that ceiling.
Quality Bar
- Evidence items have non-empty title and url.
- No crash on empty or malformed API response.
- Source channel field matches the channel name.