Research Paper Scraper — OpenAlex Papers, Abstracts & Citations

Scrape academic papers with full abstracts, authors, institutions and citation counts from OpenAlex, the open catalogue of over 250 million scholarly works — an open replacement for Scopus and Web of Science.

Search by keyword, year, DOI, citation threshold, country, language or publication type, then export to JSON, CSV or Excel.

No API key required.

What you get

Field	Description
title	Paper title
abstract	Full abstract text, reconstructed for you (see below)
doi	DOI, e.g. 10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2
authors	Every author, in order
firstAuthor, correspondingAuthors	The names that matter for outreach
institutions	Affiliated universities, labs and companies
institutionCountries	Author country codes
journal, publisher, issn	Venue
volume, issue, pages	Citation details
publicationYear, publicationDate	When it appeared
citedByCount	Times cited
fwci	Field-weighted citation impact — citations normalised against the field average
citationNormalizedPercentile	Where it ranks in its field
referencedWorksCount	Size of its bibliography
isOpenAccess, oaStatus, pdfUrl	Free full-text availability and a direct PDF link
topics, primaryField, keywords	Subject classification
isRetracted	Retraction flag
type, language	Publication type and language
landingPageUrl, url	Links

The abstract is the point

OpenAlex stores abstracts as an inverted index — a map of every word to the positions it occupies — which is unusable as text. This actor rebuilds the readable abstract for every paper, so you get prose you can feed straight into a summariser, an embedding model or a literature review.

Example input

{
  "searchTerm": "CRISPR gene editing",
  "fromPublicationDate": "2024-01-01",
  "minCitations": 10,
  "openAccessOnly": true,
  "sortBy": "cited_by_count:desc",
  "maxWorks": 200
}

Or fetch one exact paper:

{ "doi": "10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2" }

Or survey a country's output in a field:

{
  "searchTerm": "solid state battery",
  "institutionCountry": "cn",
  "publicationYear": "2025",
  "sortBy": "cited_by_count:desc"
}

Example output

{
  "id": "W2741809807",
  "doi": "10.7717/peerj.4375",
  "title": "The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles",
  "abstract": "Despite growing interest in Open Access to scholarly literature...",
  "publicationYear": 2018,
  "journal": "PeerJ",
  "firstAuthor": "Heather Piwowar",
  "institutions": ["Impactstory", "University of Pittsburgh"],
  "institutionCountries": ["us", "ca"],
  "citedByCount": 1243,
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "oaStatus": "gold",
  "pdfUrl": "https://peerj.com/articles/4375.pdf",
  "primaryField": "Social Sciences"
}

Who uses this

• Researchers and PhD students — systematic literature reviews with abstracts included, in minutes instead of weeks
• R&D and competitive intelligence — who is publishing on your technology, at which company or lab, and how fast the field is growing
• Tech transfer and VC scouting — find highly cited recent work and the institutions behind it before it becomes a startup
• Bibliometrics and research offices — citation impact and FWCI by department, country or year
• AI and ML teams — build a training or RAG corpus of real abstracts with clean metadata and open-access PDF links
• Recruiters in deep tech — identify corresponding authors working on a specific method

Rate limits and the polite pool

OpenAlex asks API users to identify themselves with a contact address, and gives identified traffic a much more reliable service. The actor always sends one, but you can put your own e-mail in the Contact e-mail field to run in OpenAlex's polite pool under your own identity — recommended for large pulls. The actor also backs off and retries automatically on rate limits.

Pricing

Pay per result. Each paper returned counts as one result.

Notes

• Data comes from OpenAlex (OurResearch), released under CC0.
• A minority of records have no abstract in OpenAlex at all — usually older papers or ones whose publisher does not release abstracts. Those come back with abstract: null rather than a partial string.
• sortBy: "Best match" requires a search term; when you filter without one, the actor automatically sorts by citations instead, because relevance has no meaning on an unsearched filter.
• Sorting by citations favours older papers, which have had longer to accumulate them. Use fwci or citationNormalizedPercentile to compare impact fairly across years and fields.
• This is an unofficial actor and is not affiliated with OpenAlex or OurResearch.