# OpenAlex Scholarly Works Search

> OpenAlex Scholarly Works Search is a paid API for AI agents from research.memoryapi.org, paid per call via x402, $0.005/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-09-15).

Search 250M+ scholarly works via OpenAlex, filtering by keyword, topic, year, and sorting by citations or recency.

## Facts

- Endpoint: GET https://research.memoryapi.org/x402/research/openalex
- Price: $0.005/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-09-15
- Activations on Zero: 0
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/research-memoryapi-org-cbbe5abe
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_o4hq1ERKbSyKWmPoZUJDZ

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 research-memoryapi-org-cbbe5abe
```

Example prompt: Search OpenAlex for the 10 most-cited scholarly papers on large language models published after 2021, sorted by citation count.

## When to prefer this

Use this endpoint when you need broad, cross-disciplinary academic search across 250M+ works with citation and recency sorting. Prefer this over PubMed for non-biomedical topics, over arXiv for published/peer-reviewed literature, and over Crossref when you don't have a DOI and need full-text keyword search.

## Known failure modes

- No results found for obscure or misspelled keywords
- Rate limiting or payment failure if USDC balance is insufficient
- Invalid year range returns empty or error response
- Ambiguous keyword may return irrelevant results across disciplines

## How this service works

Search 250M+ scholarly works via OpenAlex. Filter by keyword, topic, year, and sort by citations or recency.

## Output

A list of scholarly works from the OpenAlex database matching the query, including titles, abstracts, authors, publication years, citation counts, and DOIs, filtered and sorted according to the specified parameters.

## Request schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object",
 "required": [
  "q"
 ],
 "properties": {
  "q": {
   "type": "string",
   "description": "Search query"
  },
  "limit": {
   "type": "integer",
   "default": 10,
   "maximum": 20,
   "description": "Number of results"
  },
  "category": {
   "enum": [
    "cs",
    "physics",
    "math",
    "q-bio",
    "stat",
    "econ"
   ],
   "type": "string",
   "description": "arXiv category filter"
  }
 }
}
```

## Response schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object",
 "required": [
  "count",
  "query",
  "total",
  "source",
  "results",
  "success"
 ],
 "properties": {
  "count": {
   "type": "number"
  },
  "query": {
   "type": "string"
  },
  "total": {
   "type": "number"
  },
  "source": {
   "type": "string"
  },
  "results": {
   "type": "array",
   "items": {
    "type": "object",
    "required": [
     "id",
     "doi",
     "url",
     "year",
     "title",
     "authors",
     "journal",
     "open_access",
     "cited_by_count"
    ],
    "properties": {
     "id": {
      "type": "string"
     },
     "doi": {
      "type": "string"
     },
     "url": {
      "type": "string"
     },
     "year": {
      "type": "number"
     },
     "title": {
      "type": "string"
     },
     "authors": {
      "type": "array",
      "items": {
       "type": "string"
      }
     },
     "journal": {
      "type": "string"
     },
     "open_access": {
      "type": "boolean"
     },
     "cited_by_count": {
      "type": "number"
     }
    }
   }
  },
  "success": {
   "type": "boolean"
  }
 }
}
```

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/research-memoryapi-org-cbbe5abe/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from research.memoryapi.org](https://www.zero.xyz/host/research.memoryapi.org/llms.txt)