OpenAlex Scholarly Works Scraper — Papers, Authors, Citations & Venues

Search 250M+ scholarly works from OpenAlex — the open index of the world's research — and get clean, structured JSON back. Filter by topic, year, citation count, open-access status and work type, and pull authors, institutions, venues, citations, concepts and reconstructed abstracts. Built for research and competitive intelligence, literature reviews, bibliometrics, R&D landscaping, and AI/RAG pipelines over scientific text. You only pay for works actually delivered.

Keywords: OpenAlex API, scholarly data, research papers scraper, citation data, bibliometrics, literature review automation, academic search API, science intelligence, paper metadata.

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Why this actor

OpenAlex is the free, open successor to Microsoft Academic Graph — a complete index of papers, authors, institutions, venues and citations. Its API is powerful but returns deeply structured records (nested authorships, inverted-index abstracts, scored concepts) and uses cursor pagination. This actor flattens all of that into one clean record per work:

• Full-text search across titles, abstracts and fulltext.
• Filters — publication year range, minimum citations, work type, open-access only.
• Flat, analysis-ready output — title, DOI, year, type, authors, institutions, venue, citation count, open-access status, top concepts, language and a direct link.
• Reconstructed abstracts — OpenAlex stores abstracts as an inverted index; this actor rebuilds readable abstract text on request.
• Fully open, no API key — official OpenAlex API, joined to its fast "polite pool."

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What you can build with it

• R&D and competitive intelligence — map who is publishing on a technology, where, and how often it is cited.
• Literature reviews — assemble a filtered, citation-ranked corpus on a topic in seconds.
• Bibliometrics & trends — quantify research output by year, institution or concept.
• Talent & partner scouting — find the most-cited authors and institutions in a field.
• AI / RAG pipelines — ingest titles and abstracts as grounded scientific context.

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
searchTerm	string	large language models	Full-text search. Empty = all.
fromYear / toYear	integer	—	Publication-year bounds.
minCitations	integer	—	Minimum citation count.
workType	enum	—	article, review, preprint, book, dataset, etc.
openAccessOnly	boolean	false	Only open-access works.
includeAbstract	boolean	false	Reconstruct and include abstract text.
maxResults	integer	100	Max works, most-cited first.

Example input

{
  "searchTerm": "perovskite solar cells",
  "fromYear": 2022,
  "minCitations": 25,
  "openAccessOnly": true,
  "includeAbstract": true,
  "maxResults": 200
}

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Output

Each work is one dataset record:

{
  "openalex_id": "https://openalex.org/W2064815984",
  "doi": "https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1231143",
  "title": "Multiplex Genome Engineering Using CRISPR/Cas Systems",
  "publication_year": 2013,
  "type": "article",
  "cited_by_count": 15686,
  "authors": ["Le Cong", "F. Ann Ran"],
  "author_institutions": ["Broad Institute", "MIT"],
  "venue": "Science",
  "is_open_access": false,
  "oa_status": "closed",
  "concepts": ["CRISPR", "Genome editing", "Cas9"],
  "language": "en",
  "openalex_url": "https://openalex.org/W2064815984",
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-10T15:00:00.000Z"
}

abstract is included when includeAbstract is on. A final {"_type": "summary"} record reports how many works were returned and how many matched in total.

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Pricing

Your first 25 works are free — every Apify account, no card, no trial clock. After that it is a flat $0.002 per work delivered.

• First 25 works free per account (lifetime), then $0.002/work ($2 per 1,000)
• Zero charge on empty runs — a search that matches nothing costs you nothing
• No monthly minimum, no rental

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FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. OpenAlex is fully open; this actor uses its fast polite pool.

How many works are indexed? Over 250 million, across all fields of research.

Can I get abstracts? Yes — turn on includeAbstract and the actor reconstructs readable abstract text from OpenAlex's inverted index.

How do I get the most-cited papers on a topic? Just set searchTerm (and optionally minCitations); results are returned most-cited first.