When building RAG systems for scientific research, querying single databases like PubMed is often too restrictive (see our guide on Querying PubMed). Authors publish across multiple journals, and papers reference each other across disciplines. To trace these connections, you need a linked citation index.
OpenAlex is a massive, open scientific index cataloging over 250 million works, authors, institutions, and concepts. It provides a clean, modern REST API that requires no authentication keys for public rates (up to 100,000 queries per day).
You can perform keyword searches, filter by institutions, and retrieve publication metadata in a single HTTP request:
curl "https://api.openalex.org/works?search=retrieval+augmented+generation&mailto=support@deepwebtech.com"
The response is highly structured, returning authors, ORCID identifiers, publication dates, journal impact factors, and the list of referenced paper IDs. This makes OpenAlex a prime candidate for constructing knowledge graphs for scientific research agents. By combining OpenAlex’s cross-disciplinary network with PubMed’s medical-specific focus, you establish a comprehensive scientific RAG source layer.