I Automated My Entire Research Workflow With 10 Free APIs

Two weeks ago, I started a research project that required: Academic papers from multiple databases Patent data Clinical trial information Security checks on all downloaded files Manually, this would take days. With 10 free APIs, I automated it in an afternoon. Here's the stack I built. The Research Pipeline Query → OpenAlex (papers) → Crossref (metadata) → Unpaywall (free PDFs) → PubMed (medical) → ClinicalTrials.gov (trials) → Patents (USPTO) → Semantic Scholar (AI summaries) → Export → Analyze Each step is one Python function. Total code: ~200 lines. Step 1: Find Papers (OpenAlex) import requests def find_papers(topic, limit=20): resp = requests.get('https://api.openalex.org/works', params={ 'search': topic, 'per_page': limit, 'sort': 'cited_by_count:desc' }) return [{ 'title': w['title'], 'doi': w.get('doi'), 'citations': w['cited_by_count'], 'year': w.get('publication_year') } for w in resp.json()['results']] papers = find_papers('CRISPR gene editing therapy') print(f"Found {len(pa