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openalex-database

Query and analyze scholarly literature using the OpenAlex database. This skill should be used when searching for academic papers, analyzing research trends, finding works by authors or institutions, tracking citations, discovering open access publications, or conducting bibliometric analysis across 240M+ scholarly works. Use for literature searches, research output analysis, citation analysis, and academic database queries.

Author

@K-Dense-AI

Category

Other Tools

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OpenAlex Database - Academic Literature Search and Analysis Tool

Skill Overview


The OpenAlex Database skill provides access to the world’s largest open scholarly index, enabling search and analysis of over 240 million scholarly works, authors, institutions, and their citation relationships. It supports literature retrieval, research trend analysis, and bibliometric research.

Use Cases

  • Literature Reviews and Research Surveys

    • Quickly retrieve academic literature on specific topics, filter by publication year, open-access status, and other criteria, find highly cited papers and recent important results, greatly improving literature review efficiency.

  • Academic Impact Analysis

    • Analyze the research output of specific authors or institutions, track paper citations, evaluate open-access proportions, identify research hotspots and collaboration networks, and provide data support for research assessment.

  • Open-Access Literature Discovery

    • Find academic papers that are freely accessible, with filtering by open-access type (Gold, Green, Hybrid, Bronze), helping researchers obtain scholarly resources without paywall restrictions.

    Core Features

  • Multi-dimensional Paper Retrieval

    • Support combined searches by keywords, author, institution, publication year, open-access status, and other criteria; sort by citation count to precisely locate target papers.

  • Author and Institution Publication Analysis

    • Obtain all publications of a specific researcher through a two-step query (entity name → ID → works list), or analyze a university’s complete research output, including open-access ratios and topic distribution.

  • Research Trend and Citation Tracking

    • Count publications by year to analyze field development trends; query citation relationships of specific papers to reveal academic influence lines; support batch DOI queries and large-scale data export.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Is the OpenAlex database free?


    Yes, OpenAlex is completely free and open, and no API key is required. By providing an email address you can join the "polite pool," which increases the request rate limit from 1 request per second to 10 requests per second, making it suitable for production use.

    How do I find all papers by a specific author?


    Use a two-step query: first search by the author’s name to get their OpenAlex ID, then use that ID as a filter to query all their works. The skill provides a helper function find_author_works() to simplify this process.

    What types of scholarly works does OpenAlex support?


    OpenAlex covers journal articles, book chapters, datasets, conference papers, and various other types of scholarly works. You can filter out specific types (such as paratext) to focus on core academic outputs.