openalex

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.