Five Scholarly Databases in One Call: OpenAlex, Crossref, arXiv, PubMed and OpenCitations

A proper literature scan is not one search. It is five, each in a different place, each speaking a different language and handing you back a different shape of data.

OpenAlex for published work. Crossref for the canonical record. arXiv for what has not been published yet. PubMed if it is biomedical. OpenCitations when you need to know who actually cited what. Doing all five by hand is why “just do a quick literature review” is never quick.

Here is the same scan in one call, with real output.

One topic, five sources

// tools/call → literature_report
{ "topic": "CRISPR base editing", "from_year": 2022 }

Four sections came back at 25 records each: published works from OpenAlex, canonical metadata from Crossref, arXiv preprints, and PubMed. Crossref returned “CRISPR-Mediated Base Editing Tools: A Genome-Wide Survey” near the top, which is exactly the record you would want.

The part that saves you: knowing which source to trust

The value of having all five side by side is that you learn which one to believe for which question.

On that run, OpenAlex ranked by citation count with fairly loose matching and returned some high-citation papers that were adjacent to the topic rather than squarely on it. Crossref matched the query much more tightly. So the honest reading is: use Crossref when you want precision, and treat the OpenAlex section as a “what is big in this neighbourhood” signal rather than a targeted search. That is not a flaw to hide, it is the kind of thing you can only see when the sources sit next to each other.

The hard half: following a claim forward

Finding papers is the easy half. The hard half is knowing whether a striking result held up, and that lives in the citation record, not in the paper.

The citation-graph tool takes a DOI and returns who cites it and what it cites:

// tools/call → citation_graph
{ "dois": ["10.1038/nature12373"], "direction": "citations" }

That returned 20 citation records, each a paper that built on the original. Walking the forward trail tells you whether a finding is doing real work in the field or is merely being cited in the same shallow way over and over. A paper will never tell you it failed to replicate. The papers that came after it will.

Why one endpoint beats five tabs

Each of these sources has its own scraper and its own tutorial: OpenAlex, Crossref DOI metadata, the arXiv preprint scraper, PubMed, and the OpenCitations citation graph. Running them one at a time and reconciling five formats is the slow way.

The Academic Research MCP server puts all five behind a single endpoint your AI agent can call, so Claude pulls the whole scan in one step and reasons over it. It is the cheapest server we run, because every source is a free public API with no proxy fight and no login. You pay per result, and a topic that returns nothing costs nothing.

Honest limits

These are metadata and abstract services, not full-text retrieval. Citation counts differ between sources because their corpora differ. PubMed is biomedical only, and the report marks that section not-found for out-of-domain topics rather than padding it. And as above, OpenAlex relevance is loose on narrow queries, which is exactly why having Crossref in the same call matters.

Ready to try it? The Academic Research MCP runs on Apify with your own account. Setup for Claude, Cursor and Windsurf is in the listing.