openalex

openalex is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Out-bloodspavin173/openalex-skill. It costs 78 tokens per session (3,140 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command-line tool for searching OpenAlex, a catalog of academic papers, researchers, journals, institutions, and related scholarly information.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find papers, authors, journals, universities, citations, related research, and publication trends, including searches by DOI or researcher ID.
Why use it?
It avoids having to manually search several academic sources when you need paper or researcher metadata.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to find papers, authors, journals, universities, citations, related research, and publication trends, including searches by DOI or researcher ID.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/out-bloodspavin173/openalex-skill/openalex
Install

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.

Any agent
npx skills add Out-bloodspavin173/openalex-skill --skill openalex
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Out-bloodspavin173/openalex-skill

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote 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.

agentmods badge for openalex

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/out-bloodspavin173/openalex-skill/openalex/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/out-bloodspavin173/openalex-skill/openalex)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/out-bloodspavin173/openalex-skill/openalex"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/out-bloodspavin173/openalex-skill/openalex/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for openalex

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/out-bloodspavin173/openalex-skill/openalex"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/out-bloodspavin173/openalex-skill/openalex.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 78 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,140 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00078 $0.03140
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.01570
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00628
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00314

Measured 11d ago against content hash ee3ce61ca692, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

openalex 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.

skills/openalex/SKILL.md · 373 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 373 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

OpenAlex CLI Skill

Use the openalex CLI to retrieve academic metadata from the OpenAlex API.

When to Use

Invoke this skill when the user needs to:

  • Search for academic papers or scholarly works
  • Find information about authors, institutions, or journals
  • Track citations (who cited a paper, what a paper references)
  • Discover related works or research topics
  • Look up metadata by DOI, ORCID, or OpenAlex ID
  • Analyze publication trends or research metrics

Initial Setup

First time using this skill? Read references/setup.md for installation and API key configuration.

Prerequisites

The CLI must be built and available. Check with:

openalex --help

If openalex is not installed yet, install it first:

npm install -g openalex-skill
openalex --help

For installation, persistent API key setup, and first-run verification, see references/setup.md.

Core Commands

Entity Types

OpenAlex organizes data into 8 entity types:

  • works - research papers, articles, preprints
  • authors - researchers and their profiles
  • sources - journals, conferences, repositories
  • institutions - universities, research centers
  • topics - research areas and subjects
  • publishers - academic publishers
  • funders - funding organizations
  • concepts - (legacy) subject classifications

OpenAlex ID Format

ID format: OpenAlex IDs start with W (e.g., W2626778328). The summary format displays reusable IDs on a secondary line:

- Attention Is All You Need (2017 | cited 6519)
  id: W2741809807  |  authors: Vaswani et al  |  doi: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762

Get ID from search results:

openalex works search "paper title" --per-page 1
# Copy the `id: Wxxxx` from the output

⚠️ ID usage restrictions:

  • cited-by, references, and related support both DOI and OpenAlex ID
  • bare DOIs like 10.1038/nature12373 and doi:10.1038/nature12373 are normalized automatically for work lookups and helpers
  • OpenAlex IDs are still the most reusable follow-up identifiers when chaining multiple commands

Read the full file on GitHub · 373 lines

Files

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.

Changes

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.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 373 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A ee3ce61ca692

Subscribe to this mod's changes

openalex is a skill published in the GitHub repository Out-bloodspavin173/openalex-skill (2 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 3,140 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.

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