OpenAlex Scraper

Scrape scholarly works from OpenAlex by keyword, date, type, and open-access status — title, authors, institutions, citations, venue, topics, open-access links, and a reconstructed abstract. Built on the official OpenAlex API: over 250M works across every field, no API key or setup needed.

Search a topic like large language models, get a clean, dated, analysis-ready list of matching papers — ready to export to CSV, Excel, or JSON, or to power a research-monitoring pipeline.

Features

• Official, reliable source — reads the public OpenAlex API.
• Full scholarly metadata — citations, authors, institutions, venue, topics, DOI, and open-access URLs in one clean row.
• Real abstracts — OpenAlex stores abstracts as an inverted index; this Actor reconstructs them into readable text.
• Monitoring-ready — schedule it on your topics and catch new papers as they're indexed.

Use cases

• Literature review & discovery — researchers and students tracking a field.
• Citation & impact analysis — build datasets of citations by topic, venue, or institution.
• Research monitoring — schedule daily and flag new papers on your keywords.
• Open-access tracking — filter to open-access works and collect direct PDF/landing links.

Input

Field	Type	Description
searchQueries	string[]	Topics or keywords. Leave empty to list the most recent works.
fromDate	string	Only works published on/after this YYYY-MM-DD date.
type	enum	Work type: article, preprint, book-chapter, dataset, review.
openAccessOnly	boolean	Only open-access works.
maxItems	integer	Max works per query. Default 100.

Example

{
  "searchQueries": ["large language models"],
  "fromDate": "2025-01-01",
  "type": "article",
  "openAccessOnly": true,
  "maxItems": 100
}

Output

{
  "openalexId": "W4401234567",
  "doi": "https://doi.org/10.1234/example",
  "title": "Scaling Laws for Large Language Models",
  "year": 2025,
  "publicationDate": "2025-03-14",
  "citedByCount": 42,
  "type": "article",
  "authors": ["Jane Doe", "John Smith"],
  "institutions": ["Stanford University", "MIT"],
  "venue": "Nature Machine Intelligence",
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "oaUrl": "https://example.org/paper.pdf",
  "topics": ["Machine Learning", "Natural Language Processing"],
  "referencedWorksCount": 58,
  "abstract": "We study how model performance scales with...",
  "url": "https://openalex.org/W4401234567",
  "query": "large language models",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-11T19:00:00.000Z"
}

Download the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML, or pull it via the Apify API.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.01 per run start (per GB of run memory) plus $0.50 per 1,000 works. You only pay for works actually returned. See the Pricing tab for current rates.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. OpenAlex is a free, open catalog of scholarly works; this Actor packages its API into clean, filtered rows.

Where do abstracts come from? OpenAlex stores abstracts as an inverted word index. This Actor rebuilds the original readable text from that index (capped for length).

Can I list recent papers without a keyword? Yes — leave searchQueries empty and use fromDate, type, or openAccessOnly to filter.

Can I monitor a field? Yes — schedule the Actor (e.g. daily) with your topics and a recent fromDate.

Disclaimer

This Actor uses the public OpenAlex API. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAlex or OurResearch. The data is public; you are responsible for how you use it.