Freesearch Search

Free Index Search channel (Stage 4e) — keyless OpenAlex / Crossref / Semantic Scholar

A zero-key discovery channel: it runs the Stage-0 query list against the free, keyless keyword-search endpoints of OpenAlex, Crossref, and Semantic Scholar and normalizes the real records into the pipeline schema. Together with the agent web-search channel (Stage 4d) it is the "only Claude Code" search fallback — no search account or API key required.

Unlike web search, this is a plain subprocess (it calls keyless HTTP APIs), so it runs the same way in any context.

When to use

• The user has no SEARCHAPI_API_KEY / GEMINI_API_KEY / Undermind login — this is

the keyless search backbone, OR

• You want extra grounded, clean-metadata coverage from the scholarly indexes

alongside the other channels.

Run it in parallel with whatever else is available; its output merges at dedup.

Recipe

Use the same Stage-0 query list Google Scholar uses:

python freesearch-search/scripts/freesearch_search.py \
    --queries-file OUT/scholar_queries.json -o OUT/stage4e_freesearch.json

Or a single query with --query "...". Options: --per-query N (default 20) and --sources openalex,crossref,semanticscholar (any subset). It writes stage4e_freesearch.json (+ .ris) with source set per index, deduped across indexes by DOI then title. The stage[0-9]*.json dedup glob picks it up automatically.

Keys

None required. OpenAlex and Crossref use the polite pool via a mailto (set LITREVIEW_CONTACT_EMAIL to use your own contact). If present, OPENALEX_API_KEY and SEMANTIC_SCHOLAR_API_KEY are used only to raise rate limits. It makes no LLM API calls.

Anti-hallucination

Every hit is a real index record, so there is nothing to fabricate — relevance, not existence, is the only variable, and screening handles relevance. Stage 5b verification still confirms each paper downstream. The keyless Semantic Scholar tier is rate-limited, so it is queried with a short delay and skipped gracefully on a 429.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: kennethkhoocy
• Source: kennethkhoocy/legal-scholarship-skills
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.