Tools

Three tools for querying the OpenAlex academic research catalog:

openalex_search_entities

Primary discovery and lookup tool. Covers all OpenAlex entity types (works, authors, sources, institutions, topics, keywords, publishers, funders).

• Retrieve a single entity by ID (OpenAlex ID, DOI, ORCID, ROR, PMID, PMCID, ISSN)
• Keyword search with boolean operators, quoted phrases, wildcards, and fuzzy matching
• Exact and AI semantic search modes
• Rich filter syntax: AND across fields, OR within fields (us|gb), NOT (!us), ranges (2020-2024), comparisons (>100)
• Sensible default field selection per entity type — prevents oversized responses; pass select to override
• Invalid select field names produce an error listing the valid fields for that entity type
• Formatted MCP output is a generic markdown renderer — every returned field is surfaced without per-entity-type hard-coding
• Cursor pagination, sorting, up to 100 results per page

openalex_analyze_trends

Aggregate entities into groups and count them for trend, distribution, and comparative analysis.

• Group by any supported field (publication year, OA status, institution, country, topic, etc.)
• Combine with filters to scope the population before aggregation
• Up to 200 groups per page with cursor pagination
• Supports include_unknown to show entities with no value for the grouped field

openalex_resolve_name

Name-to-ID resolution via autocomplete. Always use this before filtering by entity — names are ambiguous, IDs are not.

• Returns up to 10 matches with disambiguation hints
• Accepts partial names and DOIs for direct lookup
• Optional entity type filter and field-level filters
• ~200ms response time

Prompts

Features

Built on @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core:

• Declarative tool definitions — single file per tool, framework handles registration and validation
• Unified error handling across all tools
• Pluggable auth (none, jwt, oauth)
• Swappable storage backends via the framework (not currently used by this server)
• Structured logging with optional OpenTelemetry tracing
• Runs locally (stdio/HTTP) or in Docker from the same codebase

OpenAlex-specif

... View full README on GitHub