Setup & Installation
openclaw skills install @rogersuperbuilderalpha/academic-research
Or with the ClawHub CLI, for registry-managed skill folders outside a full OpenClaw workspace:
npx clawhub install academic-research
What This Skill Does
Searches 250M+ academic works via the OpenAlex API. Handles topic, author, and DOI lookups, citation chain traversal, and automated literature reviews with thematic clustering and synthesis. No API key required.
OpenAlex covers 250M+ works for free with no API key, giving broader coverage than most alternatives without any account setup.
When to use it
- Finding recent papers on a niche research topic
- Tracing citation chains forward and backward from a seminal paper
- Looking up full metadata for a paper by DOI
- Running a multi-paper literature review for a thesis or grant proposal
- Fetching full text of open access papers for quick reading
Example Workflow
Here's how your AI assistant might use this skill in practice.
INPUT
User asks: Do a literature review on algorithmic literacy in education from 2020 to 2025
AGENT
- 1Run literature-review.py with the query and year range filter
- 2Search across multiple query variations and deduplicate results
- 3Rank papers by relevance and citation count
- 4Identify thematic clusters across the paper set
- 5Generate a structured markdown synthesis
OUTPUT
A markdown document with thematic sections, key findings, and cited paper metadata