Research Paper Alerts: Google Scholar alternative on OpenAlex

Get new research papers on your topics since the last run, and watch citations of your own papers, from OpenAlex, the open catalogue of 300M+ scholarly works (CC0 data, no captchas, no Google Scholar scraping).

Typical uses: a weekly literature alert for a research group, lab or R&D team · tracking a technology (e.g. "solid-state battery") across journals and preprints · following how often your papers are cited, and how many new citations arrived since last week.

Two modes

1 · Topic alerts. One search per line (quotes for exact phrases). Searches title + abstract, newest first, filtered by date, type, open access and minimum citations. With onlyNew (default) a scheduled run delivers only papers it has not delivered before.

2 · Citation watch. A list of DOIs → current citation count, new citations since the last run, open-access link, venue. Up to 50 DOIs cost a single OpenAlex request.

Output per paper

title · publicationDate · type · venue · doi · url · isOpenAccess · oaStatus · oaUrl · citedByCount · fwci · isRetracted · primaryTopic · field · keywords · institutions · countries · authorCount · openalexId · query / watchedDoi · newCitations

No personal data: author names are not included, only institutions, countries and the number of authors. The DOI/URL leads to the full record.

Example (real run, 13.10.2026, topic "retrieval augmented generation", last 2 days)

40 papers. A second run right after: 0 new (40 recognised as already delivered).

{ "query": "\"retrieval augmented generation\"", "publicationDate": "2026-10-12",
  "title": "Drug Molecular and Route Similarity-Aware Retrieval-Augmented LLM Generation with Knowledge Graph for Semantic Reasoning",
  "type": "preprint", "venue": "ChemRxiv", "isOpenAccess": true, "citedByCount": 0, "institutions": ["Tsinghua University"], "authorCount": 2 }

Citation watch, same day: AlphaFold (10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2) → 43,299 citations · Optuna (10.1145/3292500.3330701) → 8,382.

OpenAlex budget (honest)

OpenAlex is free but metered per IP: without a key there are ~1,000 credits per day (a topic search = 10 credits, citation watch = 1 credit per 50 DOIs). On shared cloud IPs that budget can be partly used up by others. Add your own free OpenAlex API key (input apiKey, stored as a secret) for 10x the budget. If the budget runs out mid-run, the Actor stops cleanly, keeps what it found and says so in SUMMARY.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.002 per paper, $0.003 per citation check on the free plan, −10/−20/−30 % on higher Apify plans. Already-seen papers, invalid and unknown DOIs are never charged.

Limits

• Coverage, dates and titles are as OpenAlex has them. Some records have wrong or future dates (future-dated papers are filtered out by default), and a few DOIs carry a wrong title.
• Search = keywords in title and abstract (not semantic search, not full text).
• New papers appear in OpenAlex days to weeks after publication, depending on the source.