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 ' ]] pa