Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx skills add JOSETRA44/openalex-mcp --skill openalex-researchergit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JOSETRA44/openalex-mcpWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/josetra44/openalex-mcp/openalex-researcher)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/josetra44/openalex-mcp/openalex-researcher"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/josetra44/openalex-mcp/openalex-researcher/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/josetra44/openalex-mcp/openalex-researcher"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/josetra44/openalex-mcp/openalex-researcher.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00048 | $0.03035 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00024 | $0.01517 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00010 | $0.00607 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00303 |
Grade A, and why
openalex-researcher scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 417 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
OpenAlex Researcher Skill
Use this skill whenever the user needs to:
- Find scholarly papers, articles, preprints, or books
- Look up an author's publication record and impact metrics
- Analyze what a university or research institute publishes
- Explore journals, conferences, or open-access repositories
- Generate year-by-year citation or publication trend charts
- Understand the research landscape of a topic or field
OpenAlex covers 250M+ works, 300M+ authors, and 100K+ institutions. All data is free (CC0).
When to Use Each Tool
| Situation | Tool(s) |
|---|---|
| User asks to find papers on a topic | openalex_search_works |
| User has a DOI or paper ID | openalex_get_work |
| User asks about a researcher | openalex_search_authors → openalex_get_author |
| User wants institutional output | openalex_search_institutions → openalex_search_works |
| User asks about a journal | openalex_search_sources → openalex_get_source |
| User wants publication trends over time | openalex_aggregate_works(group_by="publication_year") |
| User wants topic/type/country breakdown | openalex_aggregate_works(group_by=...) |
| User needs filter syntax | Read openalex://filter-reference |
MCP Setup
Add to your MCP client config:
{
"mcpServers": {
"openalex": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": ["openalex-mcp"],
"env": {
"OPENALEX_API_KEY": "YOUR_KEY_HERE"
}
}
}
}
Get a free API key at: https://openalex.org/settings/api
Core Workflows
1. Literature Search (Topic Discovery)
Goal: Find the most impactful recent papers on a topic.
Step 1: openalex_search_works(
query="federated learning privacy",
filters="publication_year:>2020,type:article",
sort="cited_by_count:desc",
per_page=10
)
→ Returns: works[] with openalex_id, doi, title, cited_by_count, open_access
Step 2 (for important papers): openalex_get_work(identifier="10.1038/s41586-...")
→ Returns: full abstract, all authors with affiliations, topics, keywords
What ships with it
3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 11d ago First seen · 417 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A a534da9b81bb
openalex-researcher is a skill published in the GitHub repository JOSETRA44/openalex-mcp (0 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 3,035 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.
Other skills, from other repositories
academic-research
Nested swiss-knife reference for academic literature work — find papers, fetch full-text PDFs, trace citations, write LaTeX manuscripts. First action for any "get me this paper" request: python3 /scripts/fetchpaper.py — walks arXiv → Unpaywall → Europe PMC → CORE → in-house publisher-page extraction…
gleaner
A skill and command-line workflow for collecting academic literature from CNKI, Elsevier, and international open-access sources. It provides commands for checking access, preparing searches, listing results, and downloading papers.
Academic Research
Academic Research delivers source-aware research synthesis with evidence grading, uncertainty tracking, and clear conclusions.
scopus-researcher
Expert academic researcher using the Scopus MCP. Finds papers, retrieves full abstracts, builds author profiles, analyzes citation impact, and constructs advanced Boolean queries across the Elsevier Scopus database. Activate when asked to search for academic papers, analyze research trends, find citations, profile…
literature_search
Search PubMed for biomedical research papers by topic, disease, or gene. Use this skill when: (1) User asks to find papers about a topic, (2) User wants recent literature on a disease or gene, (3) User needs citations for research, (4) User asks "papers about X" or "literature on Y".
pilot-service-agents-academic
Scholarly literature and bibliographic databases — OpenAlex, Crossref, Europe PMC, PubMed, DOAJ, DBLP, Semantic Scholar. Use this skill when: 1. Searching peer-reviewed works by author, title, keyword, or DOI 2. Walking the citation / funder / institution graph (OpenAlex) 3. Looking up a DBLP author page or a ROR…