# OpenAlex Scholarly Author Search

> OpenAlex Scholarly Author Search is a paid API for AI agents from clonecho.builda.company, paid per call via x402, $0.02/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-09-14).

Searches the OpenAlex database for scholarly authors matching a query string, returning author names and their publication work counts.

## Facts

- Endpoint: POST https://clonecho.builda.company/x402/s/openalex-authors
- Price: $0.02/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-09-14
- Activations on Zero: 0
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/openalex-scholarly-author-search-e8205b65
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_9K3tbevkazqRzkSZf6lXj

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability openalex-scholarly-author-search-e8205b65 -d '<json body>'
```

Example prompt: Search OpenAlex for scholarly authors named 'Jennifer Chen' and tell me how many works each matching researcher has published.

## When to prefer this

Use this endpoint when you need to discover or verify scholarly authors by name and want to know their publication volume, drawing from the OpenAlex open scholarly graph. Prefer this over general web search when you need structured bibliometric data about researchers.

## Known failure modes

- Empty query string returns no results or an error
- Author name not found in OpenAlex returns empty result set
- Ambiguous or very common names return large unfiltered lists
- Network timeout if OpenAlex upstream is slow
- Missing ?q= parameter causes a malformed request

## How this service works

Searches OpenAlex for scholarly authors matching q, returning names and work counts. Query: ?q= Returns JSON.

## Output

A JSON array of scholarly author records matching the query, each containing the author's name and a count of their published works indexed in OpenAlex.

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/openalex-scholarly-author-search-e8205b65/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from clonecho.builda.company](https://www.zero.xyz/host/clonecho.builda.company/llms.txt)