Search Scholarly Research Through OpenAlex and Your Muse

Through a custom connector, your muse can search OpenAlex, a free catalog of scholarly work, in plain words: find papers on a topic, see who wrote them, follow who cited them, and count how a field has grown.

What it does

The connector adds 16 tools, and every one only reads. The catalog holds about 324 million works: articles, books, datasets, drafts, and theses. It can search works by words, exact phrase, or meaning, and narrow by year, type, author, institution, journal, topic, funder, or open access status. It can open one work (summary, authors and institutions, journal, topics, funders, references, citations per year) and list works that cite it. It can search records for authors (with citation counts and h-index), journals, institutions, about 4,500 topics, publishers, and funders. It can count records in groups, such as works per year or the share free to read.

How to use it

1. Start an AnythingMCP account and add the OpenAlex connector. No key needed to install.
2. For a larger daily allowance, make a free OpenAlex account, copy the key from Settings, then API key, and enter it only where the connector asks.
3. In Muse, open Settings, then Connectors, and add a custom connector with the address AnythingMCP gives you. Sign in and approve.
4. Ask a plain question: the 20 most cited articles on a topic since 2020, with the journal name for each.
5. Open one paper and ask who cited it since.
6. Ask for a count first when you want the shape of a field, such as papers per year on a topic.

What you need

• A Muse account that can add custom connectors
• An AnythingMCP account with the OpenAlex connector added
• A free OpenAlex API key (optional, recommended for regular use)

What to watch for

• Without a key, all callers on the same network share one small daily budget, so searches can stop for the day. A free key raises that budget tenfold.
• Citation counts show attention, not quality. A heavily cited paper can be cited because later work disagrees with it, so read the paper itself before you rely on it.
• The connector reads catalog records only: no full-text downloads, no saved searches, no alerts.
• Author records can merge or split people with similar names. Check the institution and topic before you treat a record as one person.
• This is a custom connector, and Meta does not review custom connectors. You can disconnect it in Settings at any time. The muse prepares, you decide.