OpenAlex
Shanone’s OpenAlex integration gives your agent 2 tools for searching and retrieving scholarly works from OpenAlex, a fully open catalog of papers, authors, and citations — no account or API key required.Getting Started
1
No connection required
OpenAlex is a free, open API. There’s nothing to authorize in Integrations — the tools work out of the box.
2
Ask your agent to search
Try something like “search OpenAlex for recent papers on transformer architectures” or “look up this paper by its DOI”.
3
Tool calls succeed immediately
shanone_execute_tool calls for openalex_* tools work without any setup step.Available Tools
Shanone provides 2 tools for OpenAlex, organized into this category:Works search
Works search
openalex_search_works — full-text search across OpenAlex’s works index with filters (publication year, open access status, etc.) and paging
openalex_get_work_by_doi — retrieve full details (authors, citation count, open access status, abstract) for a paper by its DOICommon Use Cases
Literature reviews
Search a topic and pull citation counts and open-access links for the most relevant papers
Citation lookups
Resolve a DOI mentioned in a document to its full metadata and abstract
Open-access discovery
Filter search results to only open-access papers before summarizing findings
Trend spotting
Filter by publication year to see how research volume on a topic has changed over time
Troubleshooting
openalex_get_work_by_doi returns a 404 for a DOI I know exists
openalex_get_work_by_doi returns a 404 for a DOI I know exists
Pass the bare DOI (e.g.
10.1038/nature12373) rather than a full https://doi.org/... URL — the tool strips common prefixes automatically, but unusual formats can still fail to resolve.openalex_search_works results feel slow or rate-limited
openalex_search_works results feel slow or rate-limited
OpenAlex prioritizes requests that include a contact email (“polite pool”). This is configured at the Shanone deployment level via an environment variable, not per-user — if you’re self-hosting, set
OPENALEX_EMAIL.Abstracts are missing or truncated
Abstracts are missing or truncated
OpenAlex stores abstracts as an inverted index and Shanone reconstructs them from word positions; very long abstracts are truncated to the first 100 words to keep responses compact.