OpenAlex Scholarly Works Scraper

Turn the free, fully-open OpenAlex catalogue into clean, paginated dataset rows. OpenAlex is the open index of the world's scholarly research (~250M+ works, authors, institutions and journals) that filled the gap left by Microsoft Academic Graph's shutdown. This actor queries its official public REST API (https://api.openalex.org, no account, no API key) and returns one tidy record per result plus the complete raw object.

Great for literature reviews, bibliometrics, research-trend analysis, competitive intelligence, and building scholarly datasets.

What it scrapes

• Works — papers, preprints, books, book chapters, datasets, dissertations, reviews… Each record has: OpenAlex id, DOI, title, publication year & date, type, language, author names + ids, affiliated institutions + countries, host venue (journal/repository), citation count, open-access status + URL, concepts/topics, referenced-works count, a reconstructed plain-text abstract, and a link to the OpenAlex page — plus the lossless raw work object.
• Authors / Institutions / Sources — set What to scrape to one of these to resolve an entity (name, ids, ORCID/ROR/ISSN, works & citation counts, h-index) — handy for finding the id to plug back into a Works query.

How to query

• Search term — free text across titles/abstracts/full text (Works) or names (others).
• Structured Works filters — author id, institution id, concept id, source id, work type, year range or exact year, open-access-only. All combined server-side (AND).
• Advanced raw filter — any OpenAlex filter expression, e.g. cited_by_count:>100,has_doi:true, AND-ed onto the above.
• Sort — e.g. cited_by_count:desc, publication_date:desc.
• Max results — the actor auto-paginates via OpenAlex's cursor (200/request), so this can be large.

Example input

{
  "entityType": "works",
  "search": "machine learning",
  "fromYear": 2022,
  "openAccessOnly": true,
  "sort": "cited_by_count:desc",
  "maxResults": 500
}

Find a specific author's papers:

{ "entityType": "works", "authorId": "A5105141183", "sort": "publication_date:desc" }

Look up an institution id:

{ "entityType": "institutions", "search": "Harvard University" }

Output

One dataset item per result. A no-match query returns 0 items (not an error). Every optional column is nullable, so records from different entity types share one schema; use the raw field for anything the normalized columns don't expose.

Pricing

Pay per result — you're charged one event per record returned. A query that matches nothing costs nothing.

Notes

• Uses OpenAlex's polite pool via a contact email in the request; set Contact email to your address for the best service. No key required either way.
• Data © the OpenAlex project, released under CC0. Please cite OpenAlex where appropriate.
• Not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAlex.