Openalex MCP Server

What openalex-mcp-server MCP server does

openalex-mcp-server MCP server gives an MCP-compatible agent access to OpenAlex catalog data. The catalog includes more than 270 million works, along with records for authors, sources, institutions, topics, keywords, publishers, and funders. Queries can search, filter, sort, select fields, retrieve records by identifier, or aggregate results for distribution and trend analysis.

The server fits the 🔬 Research category and is intended for workflows that need structured scholarly metadata rather than only free-form web search. Two included prompts provide guided workflows: one for systematic literature reviews and another for mapping a research landscape by topic, publication volume, authors, institutions, open-access rates, and funding sources.

How it works

openalex-mcp-server MCP server exposes five tools through MCP. openalex_search_entities works across all eight OpenAlex entity types and supports keyword, exact, and semantic search, filters, sorting, field selection, pagination, and direct lookup by supported identifiers. openalex_analyze_trends performs group-by aggregations for trend or distribution analysis.

openalex_resolve_name converts names and identifiers such as DOI, ORCID, ROR, PMID, ISSN, and OpenAlex IDs into canonical OpenAlex IDs. openalex_get_citation_graph follows one relationship layer from a seed work, using cites, cited_by, or related_to. openalex_describe_fields lists valid fields for filtering, grouping, and selection for an entity type.

Search results support cursor pagination for keyword and exact searches, with up to 100 records per page and a default of 25. Semantic search uses page-based traversal, accepts up to 50 results per page, and is rate-limited to approximately one request per second. The tools also normalize supported country and language values to the forms used by OpenAlex.

Setup and configuration

The package is published as @cyanheads/openalex-mcp-server and can be launched with npx. The repository also provides a Docker image and installation links for Claude Desktop, Cursor, and VS Code. Clients can connect over standard input/output or Streamable HTTP.

A hosted endpoint is available at https://openalex.caseyjhand.com/mcp, while local deployments can use the package or container distribution.

Tools and capabilities

For an agent building research workflows, openalex-mcp-server MCP server supports:

• Searching across OpenAlex entity types with structured filters and selected fields.
• Resolving researcher, publication, organization, and catalog identifiers.
• Comparing publication distributions and trends with grouped aggregations.
• Traversing a work's immediate citation relationships.
• Discovering valid schema fields before constructing filters or projections.
• Starting literature-review and research-landscape workflows through MCP prompts.

Limitations and notes

Citation traversal is limited to one hop from the supplied work. Semantic search uses a candidate set and reports that candidate count rather than a conventional total match count. PMCID lookups do not resolve because OpenAlex does not index PMCID; a PMID or DOI should be used instead. Identifier lookups can take precedence over accompanying search parameters, which are discarded when an id is supplied. The server is licensed under Apache-2.0.