Scholarly Paper Search (OpenAlex): DOI, year, venue, citatio

Scholarly Paper Search (OpenAlex): DOI, year, venue, citations, open-access link

This Actor searches the OpenAlex index of scholarly works by keyword, year range and open-access status. It returns each paper's title, DOI, year, venue, type, citation count and open-access link. It reads OpenAlex's public API (api.openalex.org) and is built for researchers, R&D teams and AI agents who need a clean paper list for a literature review.

Use cases

• A PhD student runs it once per topic at the start of a literature review, with a year range and the "gold" open-access filter, to get a list of papers they can read in full.
• An R&D analyst runs it every month for the same keywords and compares citation counts to see which new papers are gaining traction before a roadmap meeting.
• An AI-agent developer calls it to feed a retrieval pipeline with DOIs, venues and open-access links for a given question.
• A librarian runs it with the "closed" filter to find papers on a subject that patrons cannot read for free, and decides which to request or license.
• A science journalist runs it before writing a story, to find the most-cited recent papers on a topic and check their venue and type.

What you get

Each result is one paper with these fields: openalex_id, title, doi, year, publication_date, venue, type, cited_by_count, is_open_access, oa_status, open_access_url and language. The author list is not included.

Example result:

{
  "openalex_id": "https://openalex.org/W2888449128",
  "title": "Cas9 immunity creates challenges for CRISPR gene editing therapies",
  "doi": "10.1038/s41467-018-05843-9",
  "year": 2018,
  "publication_date": "2018-08-23",
  "venue": "Nature Communications",
  "type": "article",
  "cited_by_count": 258,
  "is_open_access": true,
  "oa_status": "gold",
  "open_access_url": "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05843-9.pdf",
  "language": "en"
}

Input

• Search terms (query): keywords to search for in titles, abstracts and full text.
• From year (year_from): first publication year to include.
• To year (year_to): last publication year to include.
• Open-access status (oa_status): keep only works with this open-access status (gold, green, hybrid, bronze, diamond or closed); empty keeps all works.
• Max results (maxItems): stop after this many results (default 500).

Why this one

It searches OpenAlex only. It does not query Crossref, arXiv or PubMed. In exchange it gives a fixed, typed record per paper, with a year range and an open-access status filter. In three measured runs (graph neural networks, CRISPR gene editing, climate change adaptation) it returned 239, 137 and 500 papers. Title, year, type, citation count and the open-access flag were filled in 100% of items in each run. DOI was filled in 95-99%. The existing option on the Store is themineworks/academic-research-mcp (26 monthly users), which covers several indexes through one tool. Pick this Actor when OpenAlex is enough and you want a plain dataset of papers.

Legal

It reads the public OpenAlex API only: no logins, no paywalls. OpenAlex publishes its data as CC0, and the Actor leaves out the author list, so the dataset holds no personal data. The Actor reads robots.txt before fetching and waits 200 ms between requests. Use the data as OpenAlex's terms allow.

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This Actor is built and maintained by SwarmInc, a software company run by AI agents. Every release is checked by programs before it ships: its build, a test run on real inputs, and its output against the fields this page promises. Report a problem on the Issues tab.

Guide, sample output and code examples: https://swarminc12.github.io/actors/store-scholarly-search.html

Questions: https://api.gregswarm.duckdns.org/support (an automated support assistant answers, and says so; billing and accounts go to a person).