Research Radar — Papers, Preprints & Patents

Search OpenAlex, arXiv, PubMed, Europe PMC and patent records at once and get one clean, deduplicated, newest-first list of papers, preprints and patents — with abstracts, authors and affiliations, DOIs, PDF links, citation counts and open-access status. Schedule it with Only new results and it becomes a research alert; follow it as an RSS/Atom feed; add AI summaries and multilingual search on your own AI key.

Built for R&D and innovation teams watching a technology, IP and patent professionals tracking prior art, pharma and biotech scouting new findings, investors and analysts following a field, librarians, and AI agents that need fresh research.

Why this radar

• Many sources, one record each. The same paper found by OpenAlex, PubMed and Europe PMC comes back once, with the best fields from each and a foundIn list. Matching uses DOIs, PubMed / PMC / arXiv ids and normalized titles.
• Fresh first. Results are sorted newest first; filter by Published within N days or a start date.
• Research alerts. Schedule it with Only new results: each run returns only what earlier runs didn't deliver, so you pay only for new papers.
• RSS / Atom feed. Call the Actor's Standby URL with &format=atom and paste it into Feedly, Slack, Teams, Inoreader or Zapier. Repeat polls within 30 minutes are served from memory — no new search, no new charge.
• AI summaries and multilingual search (optional). Get a short plain-language summary of each result, or search your query translated into other languages (e.g. German, Japanese, Chinese). Use Apify's built-in AI (no key, billed to your Apify account) or your own Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, Groq, Mistral, DeepSeek or local model. The Actor charges nothing extra for AI.
• Influence, not just volume. Each paper carries its citations per year, a field-normalized impact (1.0 = the world average for papers of the same field and year) and a top 1% / top 10% flag. Sort by Most cited or Highest impact to find the work that matters.
• Retractions left out. Retracted papers are dropped by default (or kept and flagged, if you ask).
• Ready to share and cite. Every run saves a readable digest (REPORT: newest and most influential per query) and CITATIONS.bib for Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote or LaTeX.
• Official open APIs only. No browser, no scraping of protected pages — fast, reliable runs.

How to use it

1. Enter one or more search queries (solid state battery, CRISPR base editing, "retrieval augmented generation").
2. Pick sources (all five are on by default) and optionally Published within (days).
3. Press Start. For alerts, turn on Only new results and add a schedule (daily or weekly).

Example input:

{
  "queries": ["solid state battery", "sulfide electrolyte"],
  "postedWithinDays": 30,
  "maxItems": 200,
  "onlyNew": true
}

Output

Field	Description
type	paper, preprint or patent
title, abstract	As published
authors	[{name, affiliation, orcid, country}] when the source has them
publishedAt	Publication date (YYYY-MM-DD)
venue	Journal, server (arXiv) or repository
doi, url, pdfUrl	Identifiers and links (PDF when openly available)
openAccess, citations, language, keywords	When known
citationsPerYear	Citations divided by years since publication
fieldNormalizedImpact, citationRank	Impact against papers of the same field and year (1.0 = average); top 1% / top 10%
retracted	true for retracted papers (only with Include retracted)
ids	openalex, pmid, pmcid, arxiv, europepmc
patent	For patents: number, kind, country, applicationNumber, filingDate, priorityDate, classifications (IPC/CPC), applicants
foundIn	Every source that returned it
query, matchedQuery, queryLanguage	Which of your queries found it (and the translation, for multilingual search)
aiSummary	With AI summaries on

The key-value store also holds REPORT (a Markdown digest to read or forward) and CITATIONS (BibTeX).

Sources

Source	Covers
OpenAlex	250M+ scholarly works in every field (journals, conferences, books, preprints)
arXiv	Preprints in physics, computer science, maths, quantitative biology and finance, statistics, engineering
PubMed	Biomedical and life-science literature
Europe PMC	Life-science literature and preprints (bioRxiv, medRxiv, Research Square…)
Patents	Patent records indexed by Europe PMC (strongest for life sciences and medical devices)
Crossref (optional)	DOI metadata from publishers

Broader patent coverage (USPTO full text, EPO) is planned.

Pricing

$3 per 1,000 results (each paper or patent counts once, however many sources found it) plus a small start fee per run. Duplicates and, with Only new results, already-delivered items are free. AI summaries and translations are billed by Apify's AI gateway or your own provider at their prices. See the Pricing tab, and set a maximum charge per run to cap spend.

Tips

• Use several specific queries rather than one broad one; results are merged.
• Queries match titles and abstracts, so papers that only mention your words in passing stay out.
• For a literature review, set Sort by to Highest impact with Published within 1,100 days: the most influential work of the last three years, deduplicated, with BibTeX.
• For a weekly alert, set Published within to 8 days and schedule weekly with Only new results.
• A free OpenAlex key gives your runs their own daily budget.

Use from AI agents

The Actor is also an MCP tool (Standby /mcp), and part of the webdata-tools-mcp server.