OpenAlex Academic Papers & Authors Tracker

What does OpenAlex Papers Tracker do?

OpenAlex Papers Tracker searches and collects academic research records from OpenAlex — a free, fully open scholarly knowledge graph with 250M+ works, 90M+ authors, and data on institutions, journals, and research concepts. This OpenAlex papers tracker provides structured access to scientific publications data including titles, abstracts, citation counts, open-access status, author affiliations, and venue details. Search by keyword, publication year, citation threshold, or research field, and retrieve clean JSON records ready for analysis — no API key required.

Unlike Semantic Scholar or Google Scholar, OpenAlex exposes a comprehensive, machine-readable academic research API under an open license (CC0), making it the ideal data source for large-scale literature mining, citation network analysis, and research trend tracking.

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Why use OpenAlex Papers Tracker?

• Literature review automation — Search thousands of papers by keyword or concept and pull structured metadata (title, abstract, authors, citations) into a spreadsheet or database in minutes instead of days
• Citation analysis and impact measurement — Retrieve citation counts, h-index data, and reference graphs for authors or institutions to quantify research impact
• Research trend tracking — Monitor how publication volume and citation velocity for topics like "large language models", "CRISPR", or "zero-knowledge proofs" evolve year over year
• Competitive intelligence for R&D teams — Track which institutions and authors are publishing most in your domain, and what venues they target
• Academic fintech and investment research — Surface cutting-edge scientific publications data in AI, biotech, or crypto to identify emerging technologies before they reach the mainstream

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How to use OpenAlex Papers Tracker

1. Open the actor on Apify and click Try for free
2. Choose a mode: works (papers), authors, institutions, concepts, or venues
3. Enter a search query (e.g. "large language models", "blockchain consensus", "CRISPR gene editing")
4. Apply optional filters: publication_year (e.g. "2023-2024"), cited_by_count (e.g. ">50"), open_access (true/false)
5. Set sortBy (e.g. "cited_by_count:desc" or "publication_date:desc") and limit (up to 10,000)
6. Toggle includeAbstract and includeAuthors as needed
7. Click Start — results are paginated automatically at 200 records per page
8. Download as JSON / CSV or connect via Apify API

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	works	works, authors, institutions, concepts, or venues
search	string	—	Full-text search query (e.g. "large language models", "CRISPR")
filters	object	—	Optional: publication_year ("2023-2024" or "2024"), cited_by_count (">10"), open_access (true/false)
sortBy	string	cited_by_count:desc	Sort field and direction (e.g. "publication_date:desc")
limit	integer	100	Max records to fetch (1–10,000)
includeAbstract	boolean	true	Include paper abstract (works mode only)
includeAuthors	boolean	true	Include author details (works mode only)

Filter examples

Goal	Filter config
Papers from 2024 only	{ "publication_year": "2024" }
Highly-cited papers (50+ citations)	{ "cited_by_count": ">50" }
Open-access papers from 2022–2024	{ "publication_year": "2022-2024", "open_access": true }

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Output

Mode: works — scientific papers

[
  {
    "id": "W2964093445",
    "title": "Attention Is All You Need",
    "publication_year": 2017,
    "publication_date": "2017-06-12",
    "doi": "10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762",
    "open_access": true,
    "cited_by_count": 142000,
    "abstract": "The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks...",
    "authors": [
      {
        "author_name": "Ashish Vaswani",
        "institution": "Google Brain",
        "orcid": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5229-0601"
      }
    ],
    "venue": "Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems",
    "concepts": ["Transformer", "Attention mechanism", "Deep learning"],
    "url": "https://openalex.org/W2964093445"
  },
  {
    "id": "W3177828909",
    "title": "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners",
    "publication_year": 2020,
    "publication_date": "2020-05-28",
    "doi": "10.48550/arXiv.2005.14165",
    "open_access": true,
    "cited_by_count": 38000,
    "abstract": "We demonstrate that scaling language models greatly improves task-agnostic, few-shot performance...",
    "authors": [
      { "author_name": "Tom Brown", "institution": "OpenAI" }
    ],
    "venue": "Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems",
    "concepts": ["GPT-3", "Few-shot learning", "Language model"],
    "url": "https://openalex.org/W3177828909"
  }
]

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Data fields

Field	Type	Description
id	string	OpenAlex unique work identifier
title	string	Paper title
publication_year	integer	Year of publication
publication_date	string	Full ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD)
doi	string	Digital Object Identifier
open_access	boolean	Whether the paper is freely available
cited_by_count	integer	Total citation count as of query time
abstract	string	Paper abstract (if includeAbstract = true)
authors	array	Author names, institutions, and ORCIDs
venue	string	Journal or conference name
concepts	array	OpenAlex-assigned research concepts / topics
url	string	Direct link to the OpenAlex record

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Cost estimation

Event	Price	Example
Actor start	$0.001	One-time per run
Per record returned	$0.001	—
100 papers	$0.101	Quick topic overview
1,000 papers	$1.001	Systematic literature review
10,000 papers	$10.001	Field-wide trend analysis

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FAQ

Do I need an API key or OpenAlex account? No. OpenAlex is a fully open, free API — no registration or API key required. This actor uses the public OpenAlex REST API with a polite crawling rate (3 concurrent requests, 300ms delay) to stay within the recommended usage limits.

What is the difference between works, authors, and institutions modes? In works mode the actor returns individual papers with abstracts and citation counts. In authors mode it returns researcher profiles with h-index, total citations, and affiliated institutions. In institutions mode it returns university and research organization profiles. Use concepts or venues mode to explore topic taxonomies or journal/conference metadata.

How many papers can I retrieve? The limit field supports up to 10,000 records per run. For larger-scale corpus collection (e.g. all papers in a field), run multiple queries with different year filters and merge the results. OpenAlex indexes over 250M works in total.

Disclaimer: This actor accesses publicly available academic research data from the OpenAlex API, which is released under the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication. The developer is not affiliated with OpenAlex or OurResearch. Citation counts and metadata accuracy depend on OpenAlex's underlying data sources.

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Keywords: OpenAlex papers tracker, academic research API, scientific publications data, literature review automation, citation analysis, research trend tracker, open access papers, scholarly knowledge graph, OpenAlex API, paper metadata scraper

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Related actors

• Semantic Scholar Papers — Semantic Scholar's 200M+ paper index for cross-source academic research coverage
• PubMed Medical Papers Tracker — Biomedical literature from PubMed to complement OpenAlex cross-discipline data
• Patent Search Tracker — US patents building on academic research found via OpenAlex

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