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Openalex

Skill Nicowyn/paper-audit-skills/.agents/skills/openalex

Search and verify scholarly metadata with the OpenAlex API. Use when a user asks to find papers, resolve a DOI or OpenAlex ID, inspect authors or institutions, trace citations and references, check retraction metadata, identify topic experts, or summarize publication trends. OpenAlex supplies metadata rather than authoritative full text or final misconduct determinations.From its SKILL.md

Install
npx -y skills add Nicowyn/paper-audit-skills --skill openalex

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

2 things to look at

  • 23 days oldThe repository was created 23 days ago. New is not bad, but a brand new repository carrying a familiar-sounding name is the shape a typosquat arrives in, and there has been no time for anyone else to find a problem with it.
  • 0 stars0 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

SKILL.md

3.4 KB, 720 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

OpenAlex Scholarly Metadata

Use the bundled zero-dependency Python CLI to retrieve compact, auditable metadata from OpenAlex. Run bin/openalex by its absolute path, or run python3 bin/openalex from this skill directory; do not assume it is already on PATH.

Authentication

Set OPENALEX_API_KEY in the environment before making a request. OpenAlex API keys are free and are required by the current API. Obtain a key from https://openalex.org/settings/api and never print, log, or embed it in a command, report, or source file. The former email-based polite pool is no longer the authentication path.

See the official authentication documentation for current limits and pricing.

Workflow

  1. Identify the entity or relationship that must be checked.
  2. Prefer a DOI or OpenAlex ID over a free-text name when one is available.
  3. Run the smallest query that supplies the required fields.
  4. Record the query target, retrieval date, OpenAlex ID, DOI, and relevant status fields in the audit evidence.
  5. Treat missing metadata as "not found in OpenAlex," not proof that a paper, correction, or retraction does not exist.
  6. Verify consequential publication-status claims against the publisher, journal, Crossref, or another authoritative primary source.

Common Commands

python3 bin/openalex works "difference in differences" -n 10
python3 bin/openalex work 10.3982/ecta7743 --abstract --refs
python3 bin/openalex work https://doi.org/10.3982/ecta7743 --json
python3 bin/openalex authors "Daron Acemoglu" -n 3
python3 bin/openalex author-works A5012301204 -n 10
python3 bin/openalex institutions "Massachusetts Institute of Technology"
python3 bin/openalex topics "causal inference"
python3 bin/openalex sources "American Economic Review"
python3 bin/openalex cites 10.3982/ecta7743 -n 10
python3 bin/openalex trend T10539

Use --json when downstream deterministic processing is needed. List queries accept -n values from 1 through 100.

Boundaries

  • OpenAlex is a metadata source, not a full-text reader.
  • is_retracted: false means OpenAlex does not currently flag the record as retracted; it is not proof that no correction, concern, or retraction exists.
  • Citation counts and author affiliations change over time. Always state the retrieval date.
  • Name searches are ambiguous. Resolve an author name to an A identifier before retrieving that author's works.
  • For BibTeX or publisher-of-record details, prefer Crossref or the publisher.

Resources

Provenance

This skill adapts the OpenAlex CLI from https://github.com/oksure/openalex-research-mcp under the MIT License. See LICENSE for the upstream copyright and license notice.

What ships with it: 5 files

20.5 KB alongside SKILL.md, 1 of them executable

agents/

bin/

references/

Keep looking

Skills are one crate of 326,834. Ordering is by how many stacks a row turns up in, so the top of any crate is what has actually been picked rather than what has the most stars.