openalex

name	openalex
description	OpenAlex — free, comprehensive scholarly graph (works, authors, sources/journals, institutions, topics, concepts, funders). Search papers by keyword/filter/sort, fetch a single entity by ID, look up author profiles, institutions, citation networks. Use whenever the user asks about papers, citation counts, author publications, institution outputs, or research topics. Lower-friction alternative to Semantic Scholar / Web of Science / Scopus.
license	CC0 (OpenAlex data) / Apache-2.0 (adapted from google-deepmind/science-skills)
metadata	{"skill-author":"VenusFactory2 (adapted from Google DeepMind)"}

OpenAlex

Overview

OpenAlex is a free index of >250M scholarly works built atop the Microsoft Academic Graph's successor. No API key required for the polite pool. Optional OPENALEX_EMAIL / USER_EMAIL env var → priority routing; OPENALEX_API_KEY env var → premium pool with higher limits.

Project Tools (VenusFactory2)

Tool	Args	Returns	Description
download_openalex_entries_by_query	entity_type (required: works | authors | sources | institutions | topics | concepts | publishers | funders | ...), out_dir, search (free-text keyword), filter_expr (OpenAlex filter syntax, e.g. authorships.author.id:A123,publication_year:>2020), sort (e.g. cited_by_count:desc), per_page (default 25, max 200), page (default 1), timeout	rich JSON envelope; saved JSON page at file_info.file_path; biological_metadata.total_count + result_count + next_page hint	Search OpenAlex.
download_openalex_entry_by_id	entity_type, openalex_id (e.g. W3177828909, A5089215617, or full openalex.org URL), out_dir, timeout	rich JSON envelope; full entity JSON at file_info.file_path; biological_metadata extracts display_name, cited_by_count, publication_year, doi	Fetch a single entity by ID.

When to Use This Skill

• "Find papers about X" / "what's the most cited paper on Y" → search works with sort=cited_by_count:desc
• "Who is the most prolific author in topic X" → search authors with filter_expr=topics.id:T...
• "Get me the full record for [DOI/work ID]" → download_openalex_entry_by_id on works
• "What's institution X publishing about lately" → search works with filter_expr=authorships.institutions.id:I...,publication_year:2024

Filter Syntax Cheatsheet

Filters are comma-separated for AND, | inside a value for OR. Examples:

Filter	Effect
publication_year:2023	exact year
publication_year:>2020	year > 2020
from_publication_date:2023-01-01	inclusive lower bound
cited_by_count:>100	well-cited papers
authorships.author.id:A5089215617	papers by a given author
authorships.institutions.id:I4210090411	papers from a given institution (I4210090411 = DeepMind)
topics.id:T11444	papers in a specific topic
is_oa:true	open access only
type:journal-article	filter by work type
doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2	exact DOI lookup

ID Prefixes

• W = Work (paper)
• A = Author
• S = Source (journal/conference/book/repo)
• I = Institution
• T = Topic
• C = Concept
• P = Publisher
• F = Funder

Pagination

• Set per_page ≤ 200 and walk page=1, 2, ... until biological_metadata.next_page is None.
• For deep paging (>10k results), use OpenAlex's cursor pagination instead — out of scope for this tool; download the first page, inspect meta.next_cursor, then drive the cursor manually.

Common Mistakes

• per_page=1000: max is 200. Set to 200 then paginate.
• Wrong entity prefix: download_openalex_entry_by_id(entity_type='works', openalex_id='A123...') will 404 — the prefix A says author, not work.
• Filtering without an entity context: filter_expr=author.id:A123 makes no sense for entity_type=authors (use id:A123 instead).
• Free-text vs filter confusion: search="cited_by_count desc" won't sort — use the sort parameter.

References

• OpenAlex docs
• Entity-type filter ref (one page per entity type)
• Get an OpenAlex API key (optional)