Openalex Paper Search

This pulls from OpenAlex's 240 million scholarly works via direct REST API calls. No API key, just curl with mailto parameter for the polite pool. You get title, abstract, citation counts, open access links, authors, and DOIs. Search supports boolean operators, filter by year/citations/OA status/type, and sort by relevance or citation count. The abstract comes as an inverted index you need to reconstruct, which is quirky but documented. Most useful when you need peer-reviewed sources during research or want to find highly cited papers in a domain without hitting paywalls or rate limits. Beats scraping Google Scholar.

skills.sh installs: 441
GitHub stars: 8
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add kortix-ai/kortix-registry --skill openalex-paper-search --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Academic Paper Search (OpenAlex)

Search 240M+ scholarly works using the OpenAlex API -- completely free, no API key required, no SDK needed. Just curl or bash with URL construction.

Full docs: https://docs.openalex.org

Quick Start

OpenAlex is a REST API. You query it by constructing URLs and fetching them with curl. All responses are JSON.

# Search for papers about "transformer architecture"
curl -s "https://api.openalex.org/works?search=transformer+architecture&per_page=5&mailto=agent@kortix.ai" | python3 -m json.tool

Important: Always include mailto=agent@kortix.ai (or any valid email) in every request. Without it, you're limited to 1 request/second. With it, you get 10 requests/second (the "polite pool").