OpenAlex Works Scraper

Extract scholarly metadata from the OpenAlex API for academic intelligence, literature monitoring, citation analysis, and enrichment pipelines.

Use this actor to turn research queries, DOIs, or OpenAlex IDs into structured publication rows with authorship, institution, citation, concept, and open-access metadata. It is useful for universities, libraries, research products, AI/RAG builders, grants teams, and analysts mapping scientific topics or institutions.

What it returns

• Work ID, DOI, title, publication year/date, type
• Authors, institutions, countries, venue/source
• Citation counts, referenced works, related works
• Open access status and landing/PDF URLs
• Concepts and keywords for research clustering

Common use cases

• Build literature-review datasets with concepts, citations, authors, and institutions
• Monitor research output by topic, university, company, funder, or country
• Enrich DOI or title lists with OpenAlex IDs and open-access links
• Create RAG/semantic-search corpora from structured scholarly metadata
• Feed market maps for academic fields, biotech topics, AI labs, and grant scouting

Input

Use search queries, DOIs, OpenAlex work IDs, or a mix of all three.

{
  "queries": ["foundation models biology"],
  "dois": ["10.48550/arXiv.2303.08774"],
  "maxResults": 25
}

Output

Every result is saved to the default Apify dataset. Rows typically include openalex_id, doi, title, publication_year, publication_date, type, authors, institutions, countries, source, cited_by_count, referenced_works, related_works, open_access, landing_page_url, pdf_url, and concepts.

Temporary OpenAlex failures are retried within strict bounds. Invalid or missing identifiers are recorded in the non-billable run summary, while valid works from the same mixed input continue to the dataset.

SEO keywords

OpenAlex scraper, OpenAlex works API, scholarly works scraper, academic citation scraper, research metadata export, open access paper scraper, DOI enrichment API, scientific literature dataset.

Pricing recommendation

Launch around $2 per 1,000 work rows. Keep launch pricing accessible for academic and AI-dataset users while preserving margin because the actor uses public APIs and does not require browser/proxy spend.

Responsible use

This actor extracts public OpenAlex metadata. Respect source licenses and verify critical records before formal publication, grant decisions, procurement, or regulated analysis. Open-access links may point to third-party pages whose own terms still apply.

Automation ideas

Schedule recurring runs for topics, institutions, authors, or funders. AI agents can summarize new research, cluster concepts, flag highly cited works, enrich grant pipelines, and update RAG indexes or market maps with fresh scholarly metadata.