# Scholarly Papers Search — OpenAlex Citations & Open Access (`boliveira/openalex-works`) Actor

Search 250M+ research papers by keyword, DOI, year, journal, country or citations. Get DOI, journal, citations, FWCI, open-access links, topics, institutions and funders, with a new-papers alert mode. Open CC0 data from OpenAlex; a Google Scholar alternative.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/boliveira/openalex-works.md
- **Developed by:** [Bruno Scherer Oliveira](https://apify.com/boliveira) (community)
- **Categories:** AI, Developer tools
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

$0.80 / 1,000 work returneds

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

## 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](https://openalex.org), 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

```json
{
  "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](https://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:

```json
{ "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):

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

DOI enrichment:

```json
{ "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](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/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).

# Actor input Schema

## `query` (type: `string`):

Keywords searched in titles, abstracts and full text, e.g. "perovskite solar cells". Leave empty to use filters only or DOIs.

## `dois` (type: `array`):

Look up specific papers by DOI (with or without https://doi.org/). When given, the search query is ignored.

## `fromYear` (type: `integer`):

Earliest publication year.

## `toYear` (type: `integer`):

Latest publication year.

## `fromDate` (type: `string`):

YYYY-MM-DD. Handy with "Only new" for alerts.

## `types` (type: `array`):

Only these types. Empty = all.

## `openAccessOnly` (type: `boolean`):

Only works with a free legal full-text copy.

## `minCitations` (type: `integer`):

Only works cited at least this many times.

## `issns` (type: `array`):

Only works published in these journals, e.g. 0028-0836 for Nature.

## `countryCodes` (type: `array`):

Only works with an author affiliated to an institution in these countries (ISO codes, e.g. BR, DE).

## `language` (type: `string`):

ISO 639-1 code, e.g. en, pt, es.

## `excludeRetracted` (type: `boolean`):

Leave out works flagged as retracted.

## `sortBy` (type: `string`):

Relevance needs a search query. Default: relevance with a query, otherwise most cited.

## `maxResults` (type: `integer`):

Maximum number of works to return (up to 100,000).

## `includeReferences` (type: `boolean`):

Add the OpenAlex IDs of the works each paper cites (for citation networks).

## `onlyNew` (type: `boolean`):

Return only works not returned by earlier runs of this exact search. Schedule the Actor to get alerts for new papers.

## `apiKey` (type: `string`):

Your free OpenAlex key (openalex.org/settings/api) gives you a $1/day usage budget, about 100,000 works a day. Without it, runs share a small free budget and may stop early.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "query": "large language models education",
  "openAccessOnly": false,
  "excludeRetracted": true,
  "maxResults": 100,
  "includeReferences": false,
  "onlyNew": false
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `results` (type: `string`):

One row per scholarly work.

## `summary` (type: `string`):

RUN_SUMMARY: total matches, OpenAlex calls and cost, stop reason.

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "query": "large language models education"
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("boliveira/openalex-works").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = { "query": "large language models education" }

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("boliveira/openalex-works").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "query": "large language models education"
}' |
apify call boliveira/openalex-works --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,boliveira/openalex-works"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/9AgAQZ0CcWR5efuZp/builds/5bIx7yDMMmgGyyYRC/openapi.json