API & MCP access

Research Intensity (RI/RIS/HRI) for 118 elements and thousands of research topics, for developers and agents.

Getting a key

Create a free account, then generate a key from your account page. Send it as a bearer token:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer elk_live_..." https://www.elements-live.com/v1/elements/Fe

What's free vs. gated

Current element scores need no key at all; element history and topic search are free with any key — this is the open, citable tier meant for indexing and agent grounding. Topic/keyword data (/v1/subjects/...) requires an Enterprise account. Every response carries a canonical_url for attribution and a notes block flagging how each metric should (and shouldn't) be read — see methodology for the full explanation.

REST endpoints

GET /v1/elements	No key	All 118 elements
GET /v1/elements/<symbol>	No key	One element
GET /v1/elements/<symbol>/history	Free	Full yearly history
GET /v1/subjects/search?q=	Free	Resolve a query to a subject id
GET /v1/subjects/<type>/<id>	Enterprise	Topic/keyword RI/RIS/HRI
GET /v1/subjects/<type>/<id>/history	Enterprise	Full history
GET /v1/subjects/<type>/<id>/elements	Enterprise	Related elements
GET /v1/elements/<symbol>/papers	Enterprise	Top papers for an element
GET /v1/subjects/<type>/<id>/papers	Enterprise	Top papers for a topic

Paper lists

The paper endpoints return title, DOI, venue, year, citations and a link — enough to ground an answer or build a reading list. Accepts ?sort=impact|newest, ?limit= (max 100), and on the element route ?keyword=. Three things to know:

• Only the top 100 papers per entity are ranked at all, and there is no pagination past them — this is what the upstream pipeline publishes, not a paywall lever. total_ranked is how many are reachable here; total_papers (topics only) is how many the topic really has. If you need the whole corpus, that's a bulk export.
• No abstracts. The DOI is the pointer to the source of record.
• Don't re-sort by ris_contribution. It's the paper's contribution weight toward that entity's aggregate score, not a measure of the paper's importance. rank is the real ordering — citation impact with a projection for papers too recent to have accrued citations yet.

Full machine-readable reference: /v1/openapi.json.

MCP server

Add https://www.elements-live.com/mcp as a remote MCP connector with your key in the Authorization header. Tools: get_element_ri (no key needed), search_subjects (free with a key), and get_subject_ri, get_subject_history, get_subject_papers, get_element_papers (Enterprise). The paper tools are the grounding ones — use them when the question is what to read, not how active a topic is.

Agent skill

A ready-made skill teaches your AI assistant which tool to call, how to read RI, RIS and HRI without misquoting them, and how to cite them. Download elements-live-skill.zip and upload it in Claude's skill settings, or drop the folder into ~/.claude/skills/ for Claude Code. The skill checks the latest version itself and tells you when there is a newer one.

Bulk / Enterprise data

Enterprise API access, or the full corpus rather than per-call access? Contact us.