OpenAlex Autism & Urban Mobility Literature Monitor (n8n Data Table)

Automatically monitor new OpenAlex research on autism & urban mobility—then track what you’ve seen in an n8n Data Table

This n8n workflow is an OpenAlex Autism & Urban Mobility Literature Monitor that runs monthly (or on-demand) to search recent autism-and-walking-related papers, score and classify relevance, deduplicate results, and keep an always-up-to-date record in an n8n Data Table.

What this workflow does

• Scheduled or manual runs: Executes on a monthly schedule with an optional manual trigger for testing.
• Builds 18 reproducible queries: Combines predefined Boolean blocks (identity, action, and site terms) to generate exactly 18 search combinations.
• Calls the OpenAlex Works API: For each query, it retrieves results limited to the last month and takes the top five matches per query.
• Reconstructs paper abstracts & captures evidence: Extracts paper metadata and reconstructs abstracts from OpenAlex’s inverted index, recording which query combination retrieved each paper.
• Deterministic relevance scoring: Applies a keyword-based model to classify papers as RELEVANT, POSSIBLY RELEVANT, or NOT RELEVANT.
• Deduplicates by DOI (fallback title normalization): Prevents duplicates while preserving all retrieval routes and maintaining a retrieval count.
• Maintains your library in an n8n Data Table: Inserts new rows and updates existing rows with refreshed first/last seen timestamps and current status.

Use cases

• Researchers and teams who want a lightweight literature monitoring automation for autism-related mobility and walking topics.
• Automation engineers building evidence-backed pipelines using n8n Data Table as a living index.
• SaaS operators curating domain-specific research feeds without manual searching.

Technical details

• Nodes/tech stack: Manual Trigger, Set, Code, HTTP Request, Data Table (row exists/insert/update), and Sticky Note.
• Primary integration: OpenAlex Works API with monthly “last month” filtering.