OpenAlex Scraper

Pull the world's scholarly record from OpenAlex at scale — papers, authors, institutions, journals, publishers, funders, and topics, complete with reconstructed abstracts, citation counts, open-access status, and ORCID/ROR/ISSN identifiers. Search by keyword, narrow with structured filters, or look records up directly by OpenAlex ID, DOI, ORCID, or ROR. Built for researchers, bibliometric analysts, R&D and competitive-intelligence teams, and grant offices who need a clean, structured slice of the 250-million-work OpenAlex catalog without hand-writing raw filter syntax or stitching pages together one at a time.

Why This Scraper?

• All 7 OpenAlex catalogs in one actor — works (papers, books, datasets), authors, institutions, journals & sources, publishers, funders, and topics. Flip one dropdown to switch catalogs; every run lands as a clean dataset.
• 250 million+ works and 90 million+ author profiles — the full OpenAlex corpus, including 100,000+ institutions and thousands of journals, publishers, and funders, all searchable by keyword.
• Reconstructed abstracts — OpenAlex ships abstracts as an inverted index, not readable text; this actor rebuilds each one into a plain, ready-to-read paragraph on the work row.
• Direct lookup by OpenAlex ID, DOI, ORCID, or ROR — paste a mixed list of identifiers or openalex.org URLs and pull those exact records, correctly routed to the right catalog.
• Structured filters, no query syntax — publication date range, a 40-country picker, open-access-only toggle, and a minimum-citation threshold, each mapped to the correct catalog field so you never waste a billed result on a broken filter.
• Four sort orders — most-cited, newest-first, relevance (best with a keyword), and most-works, so you surface high-impact papers or catch the freshest publications on demand.
• Rich work rows — title, ordered authors with affiliations and ORCIDs, journal, publication year, citation count, field-weighted citation impact, open-access status with a free full-text link, DOI, topics, keywords, SDGs, and funders.
• Entity metrics built in — every author, institution, and journal row carries works count, cited-by count, h-index, i10-index, and its ORCID, ROR, or ISSN.
• Up to 100,000 results per run — with an optional polite-pool email for faster throughput and deep result sets handled automatically.

Use Cases

Literature Review & Discovery

• Build a ranked reading list on a new topic with most-cited works first
• Pull every open-access paper in a field with a free full-text link on each row
• Reconstruct abstracts across hundreds of papers to skim without opening each one
• Assemble a bibliography by pasting a batch of DOIs

Bibliometrics & Research Analytics

• Track citation counts and field-weighted citation impact across a topic over time
• Analyze author productivity with works count, h-index, and i10-index
• Map an institution's output and total citations for scientometric studies
• Compare journals by works count and open-access share

Competitive Intelligence & R&D

• Monitor what a target institution or research group is publishing on a topic
• Detect emerging sub-fields from a burst of recent, highly cited work
• Benchmark a competitor's patent-adjacent academic output by author or affiliation
• Surface the funders backing research in your domain

Grant & Funding Research

• Find the funders active in a research area and quantify their output
• Assemble prior-work bibliographies to justify a new grant proposal
• Identify highly cited authors to recruit as collaborators or reviewers
• Scope a novel research question by mapping citation gaps in the literature

Institutional Benchmarking

• Rank institutions in a country by works count and total citations
• Profile a university's authors, top topics, and h-index distribution
• Compare open-access adoption across peer institutions
• Look up any institution directly by its ROR identifier

Academic Tools & Lead Generation

• Power a discovery or recommendation feature with structured scholarly data
• Enrich an existing paper database with citation metrics and open-access links
• Build author-disambiguation pipelines keyed on ORCID
• Feed a research dashboard with fresh, scheduled catalog pulls

Getting Started

Simple Keyword Search

The simplest possible run — the top 100 most-cited papers on a topic:

{
    "entity": "works",
    "searchQuery": "machine learning"
}

Look Up Specific Records by ID, DOI, or ORCID

Paste a mixed list of identifiers — each is routed to the right catalog automatically:

{
    "entity": "works",
    "ids": [
        "W2741809807",
        "10.7717/peerj.4375",
        "https://openalex.org/W2755950973"
    ]
}

For an author lookup, switch entity to authors and paste ORCIDs or author IDs.

Filtered Works Search (Date + Country + Open Access + Sort)

Recent, open-access, US-affiliated papers on a topic, newest first:

{
    "entity": "works",
    "searchQuery": "large language models",
    "fromPublicationDate": "2023-01-01",
    "toPublicationDate": "2025-12-31",
    "countryCode": "US",
    "openAccessOnly": true,
    "sortBy": "publication_date",
    "maxResults": 500
}

Institution Profiles by Country

Pull the most-published institutions in a country with their citation metrics:

{
    "entity": "institutions",
    "countryCode": "GB",
    "minCitations": 100000,
    "sortBy": "works_count",
    "maxResults": 200
}

Input Reference

What to Scrape

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
entity	select	Works (papers, books, datasets)	Which catalog to pull from: Works, Authors (researcher profiles), Institutions (universities & labs), Journals & sources, Publishers, Funders, or Topics.
searchQuery	string	machine learning	Full-text search. Matches titles and abstracts for works; names for every other catalog. Leave blank to browse everything and rely on the filters.
ids	string[]	[]	Fetch specific records directly — OpenAlex IDs, openalex.org URLs, DOIs, ORCIDs, or ROR IDs. Must match the catalog above. When set, the keyword and filters are ignored.

Filters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
fromPublicationDate	string	""	Works only — include works published on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD).
toPublicationDate	string	""	Works only — include works published on or before this date (YYYY-MM-DD).
countryCode	select	Any country	Restrict to one of 40 countries. Matches an author's institution country for works, and the entity's own country for authors and institutions. Ignored for publishers, funders, and topics.
openAccessOnly	boolean	false	Only freely readable records. Applies to works and journals & sources.
minCitations	integer	0	Only records cited at least this many times. Applies to works, authors, institutions, journals, publishers, and funders.
advancedFilter	string	""	Power users only — a raw OpenAlex filter string merged with the filters above (e.g. type:article). Leave blank if you're using the friendly filters.

Results

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
sortBy	select	Most cited	Order results: Most cited, Newest first (works only), Relevance (best with a keyword), or Most works (authors/sources/etc.).
maxResults	integer	100	Cap on records to collect. Set to 0 for as many as the catalog returns. Ignored when you fetch specific IDs — those are always all collected.
email	string	""	Optional. Providing an email uses OpenAlex's faster polite pool. It's only sent to OpenAlex and never stored.

Output

Every run produces one of two row shapes. Works produce a rich paper row (with a reconstructed abstract); the other six catalogs produce a uniform profile row. Pick the matching view — Works or Authors / Institutions / Sources / etc. — in the dataset tab.

Works (entity: "works")

{
    "id": "https://openalex.org/W2741809807",
    "doi": "https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375",
    "title": "The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles",
    "publicationYear": 2018,
    "publicationDate": "2018-02-13",
    "type": "article",
    "language": "en",
    "authors": ["Heather Piwowar", "Jason Priem", "Vincent Larivière"],
    "authorships": [
        {
            "name": "Heather Piwowar",
            "orcid": "https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1613-5981",
            "position": "first",
            "institutions": ["Impactstory"],
            "countries": ["US"]
        }
    ],
    "sourceName": "PeerJ",
    "sourceId": "https://openalex.org/S1983995261",
    "volume": "6",
    "issue": null,
    "pages": "e4375",
    "isOpenAccess": true,
    "oaStatus": "gold",
    "oaUrl": "https://peerj.com/articles/4375.pdf",
    "citedByCount": 1245,
    "fwci": 18.7,
    "referencedWorksCount": 68,
    "primaryTopic": "Scholarly Communication and Bibliometrics",
    "topics": ["Scholarly Communication and Bibliometrics", "Open Access Publishing"],
    "concepts": ["Open access", "Bibliometrics"],
    "keywords": ["open access", "scholarly publishing"],
    "sdgs": ["Quality education"],
    "funders": ["National Science Foundation"],
    "abstract": "Despite growing interest in Open Access to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies...",
    "url": "https://openalex.org/W2741809807",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-07-03T14:30:00Z"
}

Core Fields

Field	Type	Description
id	string	OpenAlex work ID (openalex.org URL)
doi	string	DOI URL
title	string	Work title
publicationYear	number	Year of publication
publicationDate	string	Publication date (YYYY-MM-DD)
type	string	Work type (article, book-chapter, dataset, …)
language	string	Language code
abstract	string	Readable abstract, reconstructed from the inverted index
url	string	openalex.org work link
scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of extraction

Authors & Source

Field	Type	Description
authors	string[]	Author display names, in order
authorships	object[]	Per-author detail: name, orcid, position, institutions, countries
sourceName	string	Host journal or source name
sourceId	string	OpenAlex source ID
volume	string	Volume
issue	string	Issue
pages	string	Page range

Metrics, Topics & Open Access

Field	Type	Description
citedByCount	number	Number of works citing this one
fwci	number	Field-weighted citation impact
referencedWorksCount	number	Number of works this one cites
isOpenAccess	boolean	Open-access status
oaStatus	string	gold / green / hybrid / bronze / closed
oaUrl	string	Best free full-text link
primaryTopic	string	Top topic name
topics	string[]	All topic names
concepts	string[]	Concept names
keywords	string[]	Keyword names
sdgs	string[]	Sustainable Development Goals
funders	string[]	Funder names

Authors / Institutions / Sources / etc. (entity: "authors" and the other five)

{
    "id": "https://openalex.org/A5023888391",
    "entityType": "authors",
    "displayName": "Yann LeCun",
    "countryCode": "US",
    "worksCount": 412,
    "citedByCount": 289734,
    "hIndex": 148,
    "i10Index": 389,
    "orcid": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6212-3560",
    "ror": null,
    "issn": null,
    "issnL": null,
    "hostOrganizationName": null,
    "description": null,
    "homepageUrl": "http://yann.lecun.com",
    "topics": ["Machine Learning", "Computer Vision"],
    "keywords": ["deep learning", "neural networks"],
    "domain": "Physical Sciences",
    "field": "Computer Science",
    "subfield": "Artificial Intelligence",
    "ids": {
        "openalex": "https://openalex.org/A5023888391",
        "orcid": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6212-3560"
    },
    "url": "https://openalex.org/A5023888391",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-07-03T14:30:00Z"
}

Profile & Metrics

Field	Type	Description
id	string	OpenAlex entity ID
entityType	string	Which catalog the row is from
displayName	string	Entity name
countryCode	string	Country code, where applicable
worksCount	number	Number of works
citedByCount	number	Total citations
hIndex	number	h-index (authors, institutions, sources)
i10Index	number	i10-index (authors, institutions, sources)
url	string	openalex.org entity link
scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of extraction

Identifiers & Classification

Field	Type	Description
orcid	string	ORCID (authors)
ror	string	ROR ID (institutions)
issn	string[]	ISSNs (journals & sources)
issnL	string	Linking ISSN (journals & sources)
hostOrganizationName	string	Parent organization (journals, publishers)
description	string	Short description, where available
homepageUrl	string	Homepage link
topics	string[]	Top topic names, where applicable
keywords	string[]	Keyword names, where applicable
domain	string	Top-level domain (topics)
field	string	Field (topics)
subfield	string	Subfield (topics)
ids	object	Every external identifier OpenAlex holds for the record

Tips for Best Results

• Use ORCIDs for author disambiguation — two researchers can share a name, but an ORCID pins the exact person. Paste ORCIDs into the ids list for clean, unambiguous author profiles.
• Set sortBy to Newest for scheduled runs — pair publication_date sorting with a fromPublicationDate to pick up only fresh works on each run, ideal for topic-monitoring automations.
• Add a keyword when sorting by relevance — Relevance ordering needs a search term to rank against; without one it falls back to most-cited.
• Provide your email for faster throughput — the email field puts requests in OpenAlex's polite pool, which is quicker for large runs. It's sent only to OpenAlex.
• Reach for the advanced filter for concept and topic IDs — power users can target specific OpenAlex topic, concept, or institution IDs through advancedFilter (e.g. type:article,authorships.institutions.ror:...), merged with the friendly filters.
• Mind which filters apply to which catalog — the date range is works-only, open-access applies to works and journals, and country is ignored for publishers, funders, and topics. The scraper skips inapplicable filters instead of returning nothing.
• Start with a small maxResults to test — try 50 to confirm the catalog and filters match your needs, then raise the cap for the full pull.

Pricing

From $7.00 per 1,000 results — a flat rate for every scholarly record you collect, whether it's a rich work row with a reconstructed abstract or an author, institution, or journal profile. Bronze, Silver, and Gold subscribers pay progressively less; the table below shows the total cost at each discount tier.

Results	No discount	Bronze	Silver	Gold
100	$0.84	$0.79	$0.75	$0.70
1,000	$8.40	$7.90	$7.50	$7.00
10,000	$84.00	$79.00	$75.00	$70.00
100,000	$840.00	$790.00	$750.00	$700.00

A "result" is any row in the output dataset — one work, author, institution, journal, publisher, funder, or topic. No compute or time-based charges — you pay per result, plus a small fixed per-run start fee.

Integrations

Export data in JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or RSS. Connect to 1,500+ apps via:

• Zapier / Make / n8n — Workflow automation
• Google Sheets — Direct spreadsheet export
• Slack / Email — Notifications on new results
• Webhooks — Trigger custom APIs on run completion
• Apify API — Full programmatic access

Legal & Ethical Use

OpenAlex is an open, free catalog of the global research system, and its data is released into the public domain under a CC0 license. This actor is designed for legitimate academic research, bibliometrics, literature review, and market intelligence. Users remain responsible for complying with applicable laws and for using the data responsibly — attribute sources where appropriate, respect the usage terms of any full-text linked from a record, and do not use extracted data for spam, harassment, or any illegal purpose.