OpenAlex Papers Search: Scholarly Works, Citations & Abstracts

Search more than 250 million scholarly papers, preprints, books and datasets in OpenAlex, the free and open index of the world's research. Search by keywords or title, author, institution and year, and get clean, flat rows with authors, venue, DOI, citation count, the full abstract, topics and a link to a free PDF when one exists.

No login, no cookies, no proxies, no browser. It reads the official OpenAlex API, so runs are fast, results are reliable, and you don't have to fight Google Scholar's blocks and captchas.

$0.70 per 1,000 papers. You pay only for papers saved to your dataset. Searches with no matches and authors or institutions that can't be found cost nothing.

What you can use it for

• Literature reviews and research: pull every paper on a topic into one sheet, sorted by citations or date.
• AI and RAG pipelines: clean titles, abstracts and topics ready to embed, with free-PDF links for full text.
• Research offices and funders: list what an institution or a group of authors published in a period, with citation impact.
• Biotech, pharma and deep-tech teams: track new work in your field and spot the most-cited labs and authors.
• Monitoring: schedule a daily or weekly run sorted by Newest first to see what was just published.

Input

Field	What it does
Keywords or title	Words to search for, e.g. crispr gene editing. Use double quotes for an exact phrase and AND, OR, NOT in capitals for more control.
Search in	Title, abstract and full text (default), title and abstract, or title only.
Authors	Names (Jennifer Doudna), ORCID iDs or OpenAlex author IDs (A5023888391). Names use OpenAlex's best match, shown in the log and in the SUMMARY record.
Institutions	Names (Stanford University), ROR IDs (https://ror.org/00f54p054) or OpenAlex institution IDs (I97018004).
From year / To year	Publication year range, inclusive.
Open access only	Keep only papers that are free to read somewhere.
Minimum citations	Keep only papers cited at least this many times.
Work type	Article, review, preprint, book chapter, book, dataset, dissertation or report.
Sort by	Relevance (needs keywords), most cited, newest or oldest.
Max results	Stop after this many papers (default 100).
Include abstract	Adds the abstract as plain text (on by default).
OpenAlex API key	Optional. Your own free key raises OpenAlex's daily budget 10x. See below.
Contact email for OpenAlex	Optional. Passed to OpenAlex so they can reach you about heavy use.

Example input:

{
  "query": "\"large language models\" evaluation",
  "searchIn": "titleAbstract",
  "fromYear": 2023,
  "openAccessOnly": true,
  "minCitations": 20,
  "sort": "citations",
  "maxResults": 500
}

Output

One row per paper. Example (shortened, values illustrative):

{
  "openAlexId": "W4000000003",
  "title": "Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold",
  "authors": ["John Jumper", "Demis Hassabis"],
  "authorCount": 2,
  "firstAuthor": "John Jumper",
  "institutions": ["Google DeepMind"],
  "countries": ["GB"],
  "year": 2021,
  "publicationDate": "2021-07-15",
  "type": "article",
  "venue": "Nature",
  "venueType": "journal",
  "publisher": "Springer Nature",
  "issn": "0028-0836",
  "volume": "596",
  "issue": "7873",
  "pages": "583-589",
  "doi": "10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2",
  "doiUrl": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2",
  "landingPageUrl": "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2",
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "oaStatus": "hybrid",
  "openAccessPdfUrl": "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2.pdf",
  "license": "cc-by",
  "citationCount": 25890,
  "referencesCount": 84,
  "fwci": 900.1,
  "abstract": "Proteins are essential to life, and understanding their structure can facilitate a mechanistic understanding of their function. ...",
  "primaryTopic": "Protein Structure and Dynamics",
  "subfield": "Molecular Biology",
  "field": "Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology",
  "domain": "Life Sciences",
  "topics": ["Protein Structure and Dynamics"],
  "concepts": ["Protein structure prediction", "Deep learning"],
  "keywords": ["AlphaFold", "Protein structure prediction"],
  "authorDetails": [{"name": "John Jumper", "orcid": null, "position": "first", "isCorresponding": true, "institutions": ["Google DeepMind"]}],
  "openAlexUrl": "https://openalex.org/W4000000003",
  "query": null,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-11-02T18:00:00+00:00"
}

• Abstracts come from OpenAlex as a word index; the Actor puts the words back in order so you get readable text. Some publishers don't allow abstracts to be shared, so a few papers have none.
• openAccessPdfUrl is a direct PDF link from the best free copy OpenAlex knows (publisher or repository such as arXiv or PubMed Central). openAccessUrl is the best free copy even when it's a web page.
• topics use OpenAlex's current topic system. concepts are OpenAlex's older tags, kept because many tools still use them.
• fwci is the field-weighted citation impact (1.0 means average for the field and year).

Download results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or send them to Google Sheets, Zapier, Make or n8n. The run also saves a SUMMARY record in the key-value store with the total number of matching papers, which author and institution each of your inputs matched, and why the run stopped.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.0007 per paper saved ($0.70 per 1,000 papers). No start fee. Set a maximum charge per run in the run options and the Actor stops cleanly when it's reached.

OpenAlex limits and the optional API key

OpenAlex is free, and it gives every caller a small daily budget. Without a key one run can return up to 10,000 papers per search, which covers most uses. If you run large or frequent searches, create a free key at openalex.org (Settings > API) and paste it into OpenAlex API key. It raises the daily budget 10x and lets one search go past 10,000 papers. The key is stored encrypted by Apify and is never written to your results.

If OpenAlex's daily budget runs out mid-run, the Actor keeps the papers it already saved, explains why in the log and the SUMMARY, and you're charged only for what was saved. The budget resets at midnight UTC.

Tips

• An author name can match more than one person. Check the log or SUMMARY to see who was matched, and use an ORCID iD or OpenAlex author ID when you need to be exact.
• Leave Keywords empty to list everything by an author or institution.
• For Google Scholar-style results, search with Search in: Title and abstract and Sort by: Most cited.

Data source and terms

Data comes from OpenAlex, run by the nonprofit OurResearch and released under the CC0 public-domain dedication. The Actor uses only the official, documented OpenAlex API, keeps well under its rate limits, and reads bibliographic metadata only. It doesn't scrape Google Scholar or publisher websites and doesn't log in anywhere. Free-PDF links point to copies OpenAlex lists as open access. Please respect each copy's license.