OpenAlex Academic Research Scraper

Search 250M+ scholarly works, authors, institutions, and concepts from the OpenAlex database. No API key required.

What it does

This actor queries the OpenAlex API — the fully open replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph and a complement to Scopus/Web of Science — and returns structured rows for any entity:

• Works: research papers with title, authors, journal, DOI, citations, concepts, open-access PDF
• Authors: scholars with institutional affiliation and citation counts
• Institutions: universities/research orgs with publication output
• Concepts: research topics with publication counts

Example Inputs

Search for most-cited LLM papers

{
  "mode": "search",
  "entityType": "works",
  "searchQuery": "large language model",
  "maxResults": 25,
  "sortBy": "cited_by_count:desc"
}

Recent CRISPR papers in a date range

{
  "mode": "search",
  "entityType": "works",
  "searchQuery": "crispr gene editing",
  "yearFrom": 2022,
  "yearTo": 2024,
  "maxResults": 50,
  "sortBy": "publication_date:desc"
}

Get a specific paper by OpenAlex ID

{
  "mode": "workId",
  "entityType": "works",
  "workId": "W2741809807"
}

Find an institution's publication profile

{
  "mode": "search",
  "entityType": "institutions",
  "searchQuery": "MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology",
  "maxResults": 5
}

Output

Each record contains:

Field	Description
entity_type	works / authors / institutions / concepts
id	Canonical OpenAlex ID
display_name	Title or entity name
publication_year	Year published
cited_by_count	Citation count
doi	Digital Object Identifier
type	Document type or entity subtype
authors	Semicolon-separated author names
journal	Journal/venue or affiliation
open_access	Open Access status (gold, green, hybrid)
pdf_url	Link to open-access full text
concepts	Semicolon-separated research topics

Data Source

OpenAlex — a fully open catalog of global scholarly research, released under CC0 1.0 (public domain). Covers 250M+ works from 1960 to present.

Use Cases

• Literature reviews: find highly-cited papers on any topic
• Citation analysis: track influence and impact of research
• Academic prospecting: identify top authors in a field
• Institution benchmarking: compare research output across universities
• RAG / knowledge bases: feed structured research metadata into AI pipelines
• Pharma / biotech: discover clinical-relevant literature

Rate Limits

OpenAlex requests clients to keep requests under 10/second. This actor respects that with a built-in 150ms delay between page requests. For large paginated searches it pauses gracefully on 429 responses.

Limitations

• Coverage is strongest 1996-present, with full-text backfill earlier
• Some works lack author disambiguation (merged author records)
• cited_by_count reflects OpenAlex's citation index, not Scopus/WoS