openalex-mcp-server
Access the OpenAlex academic research catalog — 270M+ publications.
Community: Submitted by a user or imported; check the owner before granting accessOnlineNo sign-inGlobalFreeRead-only
What it can do
What data it sees
Do you need an account
No: the server works without sign-in
Access the OpenAlex academic research catalog — 270M+ publications.
Server tool list (5)
Raw names from tools/list. Only developers need these.
| openalex_resolve_name | Resolve a name or an identifier to an OpenAlex ID. ALWAYS use this before filtering by entity — names are ambiguous, IDs are not. A name returns up to 10 autocomplete matches with disambiguation hints. An identifier — OpenAlex ID, DOI, ORCID, ROR, PMID, or ISSN, bare or in URL form — resolves directly to the one record it addresses, and needs no entity_type. A PMCID is recognized as well, bare or as a PubMed Central URL, but OpenAlex indexes no PMCIDs, so it resolves nothing — pass the work's PMID or DOI instead. |
| openalex_search_entities | Search, filter, sort, or retrieve by ID. Covers all OpenAlex entity types (works, authors, sources, institutions, topics, keywords, publishers, funders). Pass `id` to retrieve a single entity. Otherwise, use `query` and/or `filters` for discovery. Supports keyword search with boolean operators, exact phrase matching, and AI semantic search. Use openalex_resolve_name to resolve names to IDs before filtering. Searches and ID lookups return a curated set of fields by default; pass `select` to override with specific fields, or `["*"]` for the full record. |
| openalex_analyze_trends | Aggregate OpenAlex entities into groups and count them. Use for trend analysis (group works by publication_year), distribution analysis (group by oa_status, type, country), and comparative analysis (group by institution or topic). Combine with filters to scope the analysis. Returns up to 200 groups per page — use cursor pagination for fields with many distinct values. |
| openalex_get_citation_graph | Walk the citation graph one hop from a seed work. Direction picks the edge: incoming citations (`cites`), the seed's own references (`cited_by`), or OpenAlex's algorithmically-related works (`related_to`). Note: `direction` follows OpenAlex's filter convention, which inverts the common English reading — `cites` returns works that cite the seed; `cited_by` returns works the seed cites. Results use the works schema; combine with filters/sort to narrow further. |
| openalex_describe_fields | List valid field names for an OpenAlex entity type and context (filter, group_by, or select). Use proactively before constructing a filter or group_by to avoid invalid-field 400 errors. Pass `query` to rank the list by name similarity — useful when you have a partial or guessed field name. Ranking never drops a field: the full list comes back either way. |