Set your OpenAlex API key — and why the 'polite pool' helps
ScholarThread enriches your papers with OpenAlex metadata. Adding a free personal key puts you in the polite pool for higher rate limits and better reliability. Here's how, and why it matters.
When you import a paper into ScholarThread, a lot of the useful metadata — the abstract, the author list, citation counts — is filled in for you. That enrichment comes from OpenAlex, a free, open catalogue of the world's scholarly work. You don't have to do anything to benefit from it. But there's a small, free step that makes it noticeably more reliable: adding your OpenAlex key.
What the "polite pool" actually is
OpenAlex is free and open, and it serves an enormous amount of traffic. To keep the service healthy, it splits requests into two lanes:
- The anonymous pool, used when a request arrives with no identifying email. It works, but it shares tighter, best-effort rate limits with everyone else who hasn't identified themselves.
- The polite pool, used when a request includes an email/key that identifies who's asking. It gets higher rate limits and better reliability, especially during peak hours.
The name is apt: by telling OpenAlex who you are, you're being a good citizen of a shared free resource, and in return you get more headroom. There's no cost and no downside — the key is just an identifier, not a paywall.
For a tool like ScholarThread that enriches papers as you import them, the polite pool is the difference between enrichment that's snappy and complete versus occasionally throttled when the service is busy.
Adding your key
- Go to https://openalex.org/settings/api-key, create a free account, and copy your key.
- In ScholarThread, open Settings → Connections → OpenAlex.
- Paste the key and click Save key.
That's it. From then on, ScholarThread's OpenAlex requests travel in the polite pool.
Changing or removing it later
The value isn't locked in. Revisit Settings → Connections → OpenAlex any time to update it. If you'd rather drop back to the anonymous pool, just clear the field and save — enrichment keeps working, it simply loses the polite-pool headroom.
Is it required?
No. Enrichment works without a key. The key is a small optimisation that pays off most when you're importing a lot at once or working during busy hours. If you routinely bring in large collections, it's worth the two minutes; if you import the odd paper here and there, you may never notice the difference.
Either way, your library is enriched with open, citable metadata — the key just decides which lane those requests ride in.