langchain-openalex

LangChain tools and a retriever for OpenAlex, the free and open index of the world's scholarly research: 250M+ papers, books, datasets and preprints across every field, with authors, institutions, journals and citations. Maintained by the OpenAlex team.

Install

pip install -U langchain-openalex

It works without a key. Requests without a key share a small free daily budget per IP address; a free API key from openalex.org/settings/api gives you your own:

export OPENALEX_API_KEY="your-key"

Tools

from langchain_openalex import OpenAlexGetWork, OpenAlexSearch

search = OpenAlexSearch(max_results=5)
search.invoke({"query": "kelp forest decline", "from_year": 2020, "open_access_only": True})

lookup = OpenAlexGetWork()
lookup.invoke({"identifier": "10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2"})

Each work comes back as a flat record: openalex_id, doi, title, publication_year, publication_date, type, authors, source (journal or repository), cited_by_count, is_open_access, open_access_url and abstract.

With an agent:

from langchain.agents import create_agent

agent = create_agent("anthropic:claude-sonnet-5-5", tools=[search, lookup])
agent.invoke(
    {"messages": [("user", "What are the most cited recent papers on kelp forest decline?")]}
)

Retriever

from langchain_openalex import OpenAlexRetriever

retriever = OpenAlexRetriever(k=5, from_year=2020)
docs = retriever.invoke("microplastics in drinking water")
# page_content = title + abstract; metadata = the other fields above

More

This package uses OpenAlex's search and lookup endpoints. OpenAlex can do much more (authors, institutions, funders, citation graphs, grouping and counting); see the docs index for agents at help.openalex.org/llms.txt. OpenAlex data is CC0.

Issues and pull requests welcome.