Quickstart

Overview

The OpenAbstracts API gives your own code programmatic access to OpenAbstracts's journal search index — with keyword and full-text search over 100,000+ journals, available over a simple HTTP API secured by an API key.

Quickstart

1. Generate a key on the API Keys page.
2. Send it as an x-api-key header on every request.
3. Call GET /api/references-search.

curl "https://openabstracts.com/api/references-search?q=marketing&limit=5" \
  -H "x-api-key: isk_live_YOUR_KEY"

Authentication

Every request must include a valid API key in the x-api-key header:

x-api-key: isk_live_YOUR_KEY

Pricing & Free Tier

Every account includes 100 free searches per month. After that, searches cost $1.50 per 1,000 requests ($0.0015 each), drawn from prepaid credit that never expires. A search that returns no results is never billed. Top up from the Billing page ($10–$1,000 per top-up).

Rate Limits & Expiration

Each key can optionally have:

• An expiration date — after which requests return 403.
• A request limit — a hard cap on total requests; once reached, requests return 403.

Journal Search

GET/api/references-search

Errors

All error responses have the shape { "success": false, "error": "...", "message": "..." }.

MCP Server

OpenAbstracts also runs a remote MCP server, so agent clients like Claude or Cursor can call the search directly as a tool instead of a raw HTTP API. It exposes one tool, search_papers, which takes the same parameters as Journal Search above.

Step-by-step guide: Connect OpenAbstracts to Claude.

In Claude: add https://openabstracts.com/mcp as a custom connector and click Connect — you'll land on an OpenAbstracts sign-in/consent page to pick or create an API key, no manual config needed.

Other MCP clients (or a local config file) can authenticate with the same x-api-key you already generated on the API Keys page instead:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "openabstracts": {
      "url": "https://openabstracts.com/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "x-api-key": "isk_live_YOUR_KEY"
      }
    }
  }
}

Claude Skill

For teams that want "verify this citation" as a reusable, named action rather than relying on the model to reach for the MCP tools on its own, OpenAbstracts publishes a Skill that teaches Claude to search and confirm real papers before citing anything, instead of fabricating a plausible-looking reference.