Two weeks ago I started building Python toolkits for free APIs.
14 toolkits later, I can search 800M+ papers, 500K+ clinical trials, 8M+ patents, real-time stock prices, and weather data — all from my terminal.
Here's the full collection:
Academic Research (800M+ records)
| # | Toolkit | What It Does | Records |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | OpenAlex | Search academic papers across all disciplines | 250M+ |
| 2 | Crossref | DOI resolution + article metadata | 150M+ |
| 3 | PubMed | Biomedical literature search | 36M+ |
| 4 | Semantic Scholar | AI-powered paper search with TLDRs | 200M+ |
| 5 | arXiv | Preprints in physics, CS, math | 2.4M+ |
| 6 | CORE | Open access papers worldwide | 300M+ |
| 7 | Unpaywall | Find free legal PDFs of papers | 30M+ |
Health & Biotech
| # | Toolkit | What It Does | Records |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | ClinicalTrials.gov | Search clinical trials worldwide | 500K+ |
Business & Finance
| # | Toolkit | What It Does | Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9 | USPTO Patents | Search US patents by company/keyword | 8M+ |
| 10 | Finance APIs | Stocks, crypto, forex, economics | Real-time |
Security
| # | Toolkit | What It Does | APIs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | Security Scanner | Scan deps, URLs, IPs for threats | 5 APIs |
Utilities
| # | Toolkit | What It Does | Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | Weather | Forecast + historical weather | Global |
| 13 | IP Geolocation | Location + security data for any IP | Any IP |
| 14 | Research CLI | Unified search across all APIs | 800M+ |
The Pattern
Every toolkit follows the same structure:
- README with working code examples — copy, paste, run
-
CLI tool —
python tool.py "query"with JSON/CSV export - No paid dependencies — all free APIs, most need no key
- Cross-linked — each toolkit links to related ones
Why I Built This
I was tired of:
- Paying for data that's available for free
- Clicking through web interfaces for simple searches
- Writing the same API boilerplate for each project
Now I have a unified toolkit for almost any data I need.
Full Collection
👉 awesome-free-research-apis — master list with all 14 toolkits + 20 more APIs
Which toolkit would be most useful for your work? I'm planning the next batch and want to build what people actually need.
More: 77 web scrapers on Apify | GitHub
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