Scholarly Papers Search — OpenAlex Works, Citations & Open Access

Search over 250 million research papers and get clean, analysis-ready rows: DOI, title, journal, year, citation counts, field-weighted citation impact, open-access PDF links, topics, institutions, countries and funders.

The data comes from OpenAlex, the open scholarly catalogue that replaced Microsoft Academic. It's public domain (CC0), so you can use the output however you like. It's a lightweight Google Scholar alternative for literature reviews, bibliometrics, research-trend tracking, grant and competitor intelligence, and feeding papers into AI pipelines.

What you can do

• Search by keywords across titles, abstracts and full text.
• Filter by publication year or date, work type, open access, minimum citations, journal (ISSN), institution country and language.
• Look up DOIs in bulk, 50 per request.
• Sort by relevance, most cited, newest or oldest.
• Monitor new papers: turn on Only new works and schedule the Actor. Each run returns only papers it hasn't returned before for that search.
• Build citation networks: add the IDs of each paper's references.

Output

{
  "openalexId": "W4406232115",
  "doi": "10.1038/s41563-024-02073-x",
  "title": "All-perovskite tandem solar cells achieving >29% efficiency ...",
  "publicationYear": 2025,
  "publicationDate": "2025-01-10",
  "type": "article",
  "journal": "Nature Materials",
  "issn": "1476-1122",
  "publisher": "Springer Nature",
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "oaStatus": "green",
  "oaUrl": "https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/245859",
  "citedByCount": 361,
  "fwci": 80.78,
  "referencedWorksCount": 55,
  "topic": "Perovskite Materials and Applications",
  "field": "Engineering",
  "keywords": ["..."],
  "authorCount": 21,
  "institutions": [{ "name": "Nanjing University", "country": "CN", "ror": "https://ror.org/01rxvg760", "type": "education" }],
  "countries": ["CN"],
  "funders": [{ "name": "National Natural Science Foundation of China", "ror": "https://ror.org/01h0zpd94" }]
}

Rows describe publications and organisations. Author names and ORCIDs are deliberately left out: you get the author count and the institutions, which covers most analytics. Abstracts and full texts are not included.

Your free OpenAlex API key

OpenAlex data is free, but OpenAlex meters API usage. Add your free key (sign up at openalex.org/settings/api, it takes a minute) in the OpenAlex API key field:

• With a key: about $1/day of OpenAlex usage, free. That's roughly 100,000 works a day from searches, and DOI lookups use far less.
• Without a key: you get the first 100 results per run, from a small budget shared with other users of the same servers.

The key is stored as a secret input. The run summary shows how many OpenAlex calls were made, what they cost and how much budget is left.

Examples

Most-cited open-access papers on perovskite solar cells since 2024 with a German institution:

{ "query": "perovskite solar cells", "fromYear": 2024, "openAccessOnly": true, "countryCodes": ["DE"], "sortBy": "citations", "maxResults": 500, "apiKey": "YOUR_KEY" }

Weekly alert for new preprints on a topic (schedule it weekly):

{ "query": "retrieval augmented generation", "types": ["preprint", "article"], "onlyNew": true, "sortBy": "newest", "maxResults": 200, "apiKey": "YOUR_KEY" }

DOI enrichment:

{ "dois": ["10.1038/nature14539", "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-024-02073-x"] }

Pricing

You pay per work returned. DOIs that aren't found and works skipped by Only new works are not charged.

Licence

OpenAlex data is released under CC0 1.0 (public domain). Links to publisher pages and PDFs point to third-party content with its own licence. This Actor is not affiliated with OpenAlex (OurResearch).