OpenAlex Scholarly Search

Export clean, structured scholarly work records from the public OpenAlex API. This Apify actor is built for researchers, literature-review teams, market analysts, and RAG pipeline builders who need reliable metadata without creating an account, managing API keys, or scraping publisher pages.

Scholarly literature search by keyword, author, institution, and topic

The actor searches OpenAlex works with a free-text query and optional filters for author, institution, topic, publication year, open-access status, and minimum citation count. You can provide OpenAlex IDs directly, such as A5086198262, I136199984, or T10181, or enter names and let the actor resolve the best matching OpenAlex entity before requesting works. Results are paginated with OpenAlex cursor pagination so larger exports are handled predictably.

What you get

Each dataset row is a normalized work record containing title, OpenAlex ID, DOI, publication date and year, work type, language, citation count, referenced works, related works, reconstructed abstract text, authors, affiliations, institution names, open-access status, OA links, source/journal details, topics, keywords, bibliographic pages, and update dates. The raw OpenAlex abstract inverted index is converted into plain text, making the output ready for spreadsheet review, search indexing, enrichment, or embedding pipelines.

Use cases for researchers and RAG builders

Use this actor to collect recent papers on a research area, export influential publications by citation threshold, build an institution-specific publication feed, seed a retrieval augmented generation corpus with DOI and OA PDF links, compare open-access coverage across topics, or monitor newly published work from a known author. Because it relies on OpenAlex, it avoids publisher scraping and uses a public scholarly metadata source designed for this kind of access.

How to use

Start with the default input to export a small machine-learning sample in under five minutes. Increase maxResults for larger exports. Add fromYear and toYear to bound publication dates, set openAccessStatus to oa, gold, green, hybrid, bronze, or closed, and use minCitations for influence filters. For exact entity matching, prefer OpenAlex IDs over names. The actor uses polite request delays and honors maxResults exactly, truncating client-side if OpenAlex returns more rows than requested.

Pricing

This actor uses Apify pay-per-event pricing. The single paid event is work-scraped at $0.005 per exported work record. There are no additional paid events. Local, free, or non-PPE runs are capped by the built-in free-run guard.

FAQ

Does this scrape publisher websites?

No. It only calls HTTP-only public OpenAlex endpoints at api.openalex.org.

Do I need an OpenAlex API key?

No. OpenAlex works without a key for these endpoints.

Can I get full text PDFs?

The actor exports OA landing-page and PDF URLs when OpenAlex provides them. It does not download or extract PDF contents.

Why use OpenAlex IDs?

Names can be ambiguous. IDs make author, institution, and topic filters deterministic.