Scholarly Paper Search (OpenAlex)

Search 250M+ scholarly works — citations, authors, year, open-access — via the free OpenAlex API.

Search academic works by keyword and return title, year, citation count, type, top authors, open-access status, and DOI. No account, no API key, and no proxies — this Actor reads a stable public API and returns clean, structured data you can download as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or pull straight from the Apify API.

Features

• ⚡ Fast & reliable — hits a stable public endpoint, so runs don't get blocked or break on layout changes.
• 🎯 Clean structured output — every result is a flat record with consistent fields (title, year, citedByCount, type, url).
• 🔁 Batch & schedulable — pass multiple queries in one run, or schedule it for a always-fresh feed.
• 🔌 Integrates everywhere — export JSON/CSV/Excel or connect via the API, webhooks, Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, and 5,000+ integrations.

Who it's for

Researchers, R&D teams, competitive-intel analysts, and journalists.

Common use cases

• Market, competitor, and trend research
• Feeding dashboards, spreadsheets, and internal tools
• Enriching datasets and powering AI / RAG / automation workflows

Input

Field	Type	Description
searchQueries	array	Search terms (e.g. 'large language models', 'crispr'). Required.
maxItems	integer	Cap the number of records returned (0 = provider default).

Example input

{
  "searchQueries": [
    "large language models",
    "battery"
  ],
  "maxItems": 25
}

Output

One record per result. Example output:

{
  "title": "Example item",
  "year": "...",
  "citedByCount": 1234,
  "type": "...",
  "url": "https://example.com/item"
}

Fields: title, year, citedByCount, type, url. Download as JSON, CSV, XML, or Excel — or fetch programmatically from the dataset API.

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-result: you're billed only for the records you actually get. No monthly fee, and empty runs cost nothing — so it's dramatically cheaper than manual research or bloated data subscriptions.

FAQ

Do I need an API key or login? No — it uses a public endpoint. How fresh is the data? It's fetched live on every run, so it's as current as the source. Can I run it automatically? Yes — schedule it (hourly / daily / weekly) or trigger it via API or webhook. How do I get more results? Increase maxItems, or pass several queries in a single run. What formats can I export? JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, RSS, or via the API.

Notes

This Actor reads a public API. Please use it responsibly and within the data provider's terms of service.