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Integrated academic APIs

The Belico pipeline relies on a set of bibliographic APIs for paper search, DOI resolution, citation verification and open-access retrieval. This table reflects the real integration status (Phase D — v3.1.0).

Integration status

API Status Use
OpenAlex ✅ Active (smoke test PASS) Paper search + metadata + citations
CrossRef ✅ Active (smoke test PASS) DOI resolution + metadata
ArXiv ✅ Active CS / Physics / Math preprints
PubMed ✅ Active Biomedical papers
DOAJ ✅ Active Open access journals
Semantic Scholar 🟡 Configurable Complementary search
SciELO 🟡 Planned Phase F LATAM corpus
Unpaywall 🟡 Planned Phase F Free paper access
ORCID 🟡 Planned Phase F Author profiles

ArXiv always HTTPS

ArXiv URLs must use https:// (never http://) — this is a Belico RED LINE. See Rules and RED LINES.


API keys

The two default-active APIs (OpenAlex + CrossRef) are free and require no mandatory key, but declaring an inherited key bumps the OpenAlex "polite pool" rate limit.

# .env
OPENALEX_API_KEY=...          # openalex.org (free, inherited default)
SEMANTIC_SCHOLAR_API_KEY=...  # semanticscholar.org (free)
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=...         # Anthropic Console (for LLM sub-agents)

Configuration details in the API keys guide.


Verify connectivity

The belico smoke-check command runs the real tests against OpenAlex and CrossRef and reports latency + status per API.

# Real APIs smoke test (requires network)
belico smoke-check

# Single API
belico smoke-check --apis openalex

# JSON output for CI
belico smoke-check --json-output

See the CLI reference for all flags.


Where they are consumed

Tool API(s) Purpose
find_top_sources.py OpenAlex, CrossRef, Semantic Scholar Source ranking for a contribution
check_novelty.py OpenAlex Originality verdict (ORIGINAL / INCREMENTAL / DUPLICATE)
style_calibration.py OpenAlex Download real venue papers for the Style Card
verify_citations.py CrossRef DOI resolution + retraction watch
literature_rag.py OpenAlex, ArXiv, PubMed Literature corpus for the RAG

For each tool's flag details see the Python API.