Openalex Database

This gives you structured access to OpenAlex's 240 million scholarly works for literature searches, citation analysis, and bibliometric research. The two-step lookup pattern is critical: search by name to get IDs, then filter by those IDs, because OpenAlex won't let you filter by entity names directly. The polite pool email parameter gets you 10x the rate limit, and batch lookups can handle up to 50 DOIs in a single request. Most useful for systematic literature reviews, tracking institutional research output, finding highly cited papers in a field, or pulling large datasets for analysis. The random sampling function handles the complexity of getting truly random samples beyond the 10k cursor limit.

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last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add davila7/claude-code-templates --skill openalex-database --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

OpenAlex Database

Overview

OpenAlex is a comprehensive open catalog of 240M+ scholarly works, authors, institutions, topics, sources, publishers, and funders. This skill provides tools and workflows for querying the OpenAlex API to search literature, analyze research output, track citations, and conduct bibliometric studies.

Quick Start

Basic Setup

Always initialize the client with an email address to access the polite pool (10x rate limit boost):

from scripts.openalex_client import OpenAlexClient

client = OpenAlexClient(email="your-email@example.edu")

Installation Requirements

Install required package using uv:

uv pip install requests

No API key required - OpenAlex is completely open.

Core Capabilities

1. Search for Papers

Use for: Finding papers by title, abstract, or topic

# Simple search
results = client.search_works(
    search="machine learning",
    per_page=100
)

# Search with filters
results = client.search_works(
    search="CRISPR gene editing",
    filter_params={
        "publication_year": ">2020",
        "is_oa": "true"
    },
    sort="cited_by_count:desc"
)

SKILL.md on GitHub