OpenAlex MCP — Author & Works

Use this server to disambiguate authors, resolve affiliations, and retrieve peer‑reviewed works from OpenAlex.

Codex CLI Notes

• Configured for stdio via $HOME/mcp/mcp-zotero-matlab-tools/bin/alex-mcp-stdio.sh (see dotfiles Codex config). Required env: OPENALEXMAILTO="[email protected]"; optional OPENALEXUSER_AGENT.
• Call tools by exact name with JSON args (examples below).

Tools and When to Call

• searchauthors(name, institution?, topic?, countrycode?, limit?)

- Use to find candidate authors; filter by institution/topic/country.

• autocomplete_authors(name, context?, limit?)

- Use for quick candidates by name with lightweight output.

• retrieveauthorworks(authorid, limit?, orderby?, publicationyear?, type?, journalonly?, mincitations?, peerreviewed_only?)

- Use to get an author’s peer‑reviewed journal articles (default). Set order_by="citations" for impact.

• searchworks(query, searchtype?, author?, institution?, publicationyear?, type?, limit?, peerreviewed_only?)

- Use for free‑text work search across titles/abstracts.

• searchpubmed(query, searchtype?, maxresults?) and pubmedauthorsample(authorname, sample_size?)

- Convenience PubMed helpers bundled here for cross‑checks.

• searchorcidauthors(name, affiliation?, maxresults?), getorcidpublications(orcidid, max_works?)

- Use ORCID to validate identity and fetch works.

Examples (codex-cli)

• Disambiguate then fetch: call searchauthors {"name":"Ivan Matic","institution":"Francis Crick"} → pick candidate.id → retrieveauthorworks {"authorid":"https://openalex.org/A...","limit":20,"order_by":"citations"}
• Year filter: retrieveauthorworks {"authorid":"...","publicationyear":2023}

Tips

• Prefer peerreviewedonly=true and journal_only=true for clean corpora.
• Include affiliations to separate common names.

Security & Limits

• Do not store secrets in prompts. Required: OPENALEX_MAILTO only.
• Respect OpenAlex rate limits; set OPENALEXUSERAGENT when available.
• Avoid sending PII; author queries should be public academic info only.