OpenAlex Scholarly Works Tracker – Research Paper & Citation API

An OpenAlex API wrapper and research-intelligence feed that pulls scholarly works (papers, preprints, datasets) and normalizes each into a clean record: title, authors, institutions, venue, publication date, citation count, open-access status and research concepts. Use it to build a research-intelligence tool, a competitive-science monitor, a bibliometrics dataset, or an institution/topic publication feed — a free, structured alternative to closed citation databases.

Who uses it

University research offices and bibliometrics teams, R&D competitive-intelligence groups, scientific publishers, funders, and research-analytics products.

Why this is worth charging for

OpenAlex is an open catalog of 250M+ scholarly works, but its API returns deeply nested authorship/institution/concept objects and paginates by cursor. This actor flattens works into readable records with deduplicated authors and institutions, and delivers a topic- or institution-scoped, citation-aware feed you can monitor on a schedule — no per-seat citation-database license required.

Output

Each dataset item is one normalized record:

{
  "id": "https://openalex.org/W123",
  "doi": "https://doi.org/10.1/abc",
  "title": "Deep Widgets",
  "publicationDate": "2024-02-01",
  "publicationYear": 2024,
  "type": "article",
  "authors": [
    "A. Lee",
    "B. Kim"
  ],
  "institutions": [
    "MIT"
  ],
  "venue": "Nature",
  "citedByCount": 42,
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "oaStatus": "gold",
  "concepts": [
    "Machine learning"
  ],
  "referencedWorksCount": 3,
  "landingPageUrl": "https://nature.com/x",
  "source": "OpenAlex"
}

Input

Field	Description
search	Full-text search across title/abstract/fulltext, e.g. 'graph neural networks'.
fromPublicationDate	Only works published on or after this date.
toPublicationDate	Only works published on or before this date.
institutionId	OpenAlex institution ID to filter by, e.g. I136199984 (Harvard).
conceptId	OpenAlex concept ID to filter by topic.
openAccessOnly	Restrict to open-access works.
sort	Sort expression, e.g. publication_date:desc or cited_by_count:desc.
mailto	Email for OpenAlex's polite pool (faster, courteous access).
pageSize	Works per page (OpenAlex max 200).
maxPagesToScan	Cursor pages per run.
onlyNewSinceLastRun	Recommended for schedules — skips records already returned by a previous run using persisted state, so you're only charged for genuinely new items.
maxItems	Stop after this many normalized records.

Pricing (Pay-Per-Event)

• query — $0.01, charged once per run for the API query/poll.
• work-record — $0.005 per normalized record pushed. This is the primary event.
• apify-actor-start (Apify-managed) — covers baseline compute per run.

A topic or institution monitor returns hundreds of works per run for a dollar or two. onlyNewSinceLastRun bills only newly-indexed works on a schedule.

Source & reliability

Data comes from the official api.openalex.org service using cursor pagination and the polite pool. No key or proxies required. Run npm test for the offline self-test covering the normalizer, including edge cases and missing-field handling.

FAQ

Do I need an API key?

No — OpenAlex is open. Providing a contact email enables the faster polite pool.

Can I track an institution's output?

Yes. Set institutionId (and/or a search term) and schedule with onlyNewSinceLastRun for a rolling publication feed.

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