OpenAlex Scholarly Works Scraper

Search the OpenAlex catalog of 250M+ scholarly works and get clean, structured records — no API key, no login. OpenAlex is a free, open index of scholarship (an open replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph / Scopus).

This actor calls the public OpenAlex works endpoint, walks results with cursor pagination (the reliable way past the first couple hundred), reconstructs each abstract from its inverted index into readable text, and returns one flat row per work.

It is a polite API citizen: every request carries a contact mailto (both as a query param and in the User-Agent), which routes traffic to OpenAlex's faster, more reliable "polite pool".

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
query	string	— (required)	Keywords to search (title, abstract, fulltext), e.g. machine learning.
sort	string	relevance	relevance, citations (most cited first), or date (newest first).
fromDate	string	—	Optional YYYY-MM-DD; only works published on/after this date.
filter	string	—	Optional raw OpenAlex filter, e.g. type:article,is_oa:true. Merged with fromDate.
maxItems	integer	100	Max works to return (50 fetched per page via cursor).
notionConnector	string	—	Optional. Also write each work as a page in your Notion. Authorize a Notion connector once under Settings → API & Integrations → MCP connectors, then pick it here. Results go to the dataset either way.
notionParentId	string	—	Optional. The Notion data source ID to write the pages into. Leave it empty and they are created privately in your workspace instead.
proxyConfiguration	object	{ "useApifyProxy": false }	Optional. Not needed — OpenAlex is a clean public API.

Example input

{
  "query": "crispr",
  "sort": "citations",
  "fromDate": "2020-01-01",
  "maxItems": 120
}

Output

One row per work:

{
  "ok": true,
  "openalexId": "https://openalex.org/W...",
  "doi": "https://doi.org/10....",
  "title": "…",
  "authors": ["Jane Doe", "John Roe"],
  "institutions": ["Some University"],
  "year": 2021,
  "publicationDate": "2021-05-03",
  "type": "article",
  "venue": "Nature",
  "citations": 1234,
  "concepts": ["Biology", "Genetics"],
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "oaUrl": "https://…pdf",
  "abstract": "Reconstructed abstract text…",
  "url": "https://openalex.org/W..."
}

abstract is rebuilt from OpenAlex's abstract_inverted_index; when no abstract is indexed it is null. Results are deduplicated by openalexId.

Pricing

$2.00 per 1,000 works ($0.002 each), with no run-start fee. Flat rate — no volume tiers, no plan gates — and you are charged only for work rows actually returned.

The reconstructed abstract is included at that price; there is no separate fee for it, and no extra request is made to get it (OpenAlex ships the inverted index inside the same record). A 120-work literature sweep with full abstracts costs $0.24.

Diagnostics & billing

On failure or no results, the actor pushes a single diagnostic row (ok:false) with an errorCode (BAD_INPUT, NO_RESULTS, RATE_LIMITED, SERVER_ERROR, NETWORK) instead of failing silently. Only successful work rows are charged (one work unit each) — diagnostics and empty results are never billed, and with no start fee a failed run costs nothing at all.

Data source

Data comes from OpenAlex, released under CC0. Please cite OpenAlex when you use it.