Map any field
with open scholarly metadata.
OpenAlex is an open index of the world's scholarship — works, authors, venues and citation counts across every discipline, no key required. openalex_search and openalex_work put that map on the console, pinned to OpenAlex IDs and DOIs.
What the instrument does
OpenAlex is a free, open replacement for the old proprietary citation databases. It covers 250 million-plus works with authorship, venue, year and citation metadata — biomedicine and everything beyond it.
On the console, openalex_search queries the corpus and openalex_work resolves a single work by ID, returning the metadata that lets an agent weigh how established an idea is.
Tools this powers on the console
openalex_search · openalex_work
Research use only. Service names belong to their owners; no partnership or endorsement is implied.
How Perslis integrates OpenAlex
OpenAlex is the runtime's discipline-agnostic index: PubMed covers biomedicine, but a materials or physics question needs a broader map, and OpenAlex provides it without a paywall or a key. Every work carries an OpenAlex ID and, where known, a DOI — both resolve.
It answers next to Semantic Scholar, whose forward-citation graph complements OpenAlex's breadth, so a single question yields both how much a paper is cited and who built on it.
Ask
One question at the console — no per-service query language, no tab-hopping.
Route
Lois calls this instrument alongside the others and gathers what returns.
Pin
Every field keeps its source: database, accession, URL. A result that cannot name its source is refused by construction.
Admit
The PEEL gate decides what enters the lab record. Reported values stay verbatim; unsupported claims stay out.
A real, source-pinned result
Pulled live from the service and pinned to its identifier — the same contract every answer on the console is held to.
| Top work | Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold |
|---|---|
| Lead authors | John Jumper, Demis Hassabis, et al. |
| Venue | Nature, 2021 |
| Cited by | 47,403 |
| OpenAlex ID | W3177828909 |
| DOI | 10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2 |
Source: openalex · W3177828909 · retrieved 2026-09-18
Why route OpenAlex through one console
Every discipline, no key
One open index of all scholarship — an agent maps a field without a subscription.
Breadth plus citation depth
OpenAlex's coverage pairs with Semantic Scholar's forward-citation graph in one answer.
Every work resolves
OpenAlex ID and DOI both open the real record — citation counts you can check.
Instruments OpenAlex talks to
A scholarly map is stronger triangulated. OpenAlex answers beside the citation graph and the literature indexes.
Semantic Scholar
Papers plus the forward citation graph — who built on what.
semantic_scholar_search · semantic_scholar_citations
PubMed
Biomedical literature search — abstracts pinned to PMID, DOI and citation.
pubmed_search · pubmed_abstracts
arXiv
Preprints across quantitative biology and beyond.
arxiv_search