OpenAlex Scraper: 20 Fields, Citations & OA, No API Key

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💰 From $0.60 / 1,000 results.

Search the open scholarly graph by topic, year, citation count and open-access status. 20 fields per paper including authors, institutions, venue and concepts.

Why use this OpenAlex research paper scraper

OpenAlex is the open replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph: a free, keyless index of scholarly works, authors, institutions and citations. This actor turns it into a dataset you can filter and export without writing pagination code.

20 fields per work, and importantly the joined ones: authors as a name array, author_institutions de-duplicated across all authorships, venue and venue_type from the primary location, and concepts filtered to those OpenAlex scores at 0.3 confidence or above and capped at the top 8. That is the difference between a usable row and a raw API dump.

Five filters compose freely: publication year range, minimum citation count, work type, open-access-only, and a free-text search term. Results are sorted by citation count descending, so the most-cited work arrives first and a modest maxResults still surfaces the literature that matters.

Abstracts are reconstructed, not skipped. OpenAlex stores abstracts as an inverted index of word positions. Turn on includeAbstract and the actor rebuilds readable prose from it.

No API key. The actor joins OpenAlex's polite pool with a mailto identifier, which is what gets you the faster, more reliable service tier.

Find the most-cited papers on a topic

Results are sorted by citation count descending, so this is a literature-review shortlist in one call.

{
  "searchTerm": "retrieval augmented generation",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Filter to recent, highly cited, open-access work

openAccessOnly restricts to work with a free full text, and the record carries the oa_url so you can actually fetch it.

{
  "searchTerm": "protein folding",
  "fromYear": 2023,
  "minCitations": 50,
  "openAccessOnly": true,
  "maxResults": 200
}

Restrict to one publication type

workType accepts article, review, book-chapter, book, dataset, preprint, dissertation or report. Leave it empty for all types.

{
  "searchTerm": "large language models",
  "workType": "review",
  "fromYear": 2024,
  "maxResults": 150
}

Pull abstracts for a text-mining corpus

includeAbstract reconstructs the abstract from OpenAlex's inverted index into readable text, which is what you want if you are embedding or classifying.

{
  "searchTerm": "CRISPR gene editing",
  "fromYear": 2020,
  "toYear": 2026,
  "includeAbstract": true,
  "maxResults": 500
}

What data you get back

20 fields per work.

Field	What it is
openalex_id	OpenAlex work identifier
doi	DOI where one exists
title	Paper title
publication_year	Year
publication_date	Full date
type	Work type: article, review, preprint and so on
cited_by_count	Citation count
authors	Array of author display names
author_institutions	De-duplicated array of institution names across all authorships
venue	Journal or venue name
venue_type	Venue type
is_open_access	Boolean
oa_status	OpenAlex OA colour: gold, green, hybrid, bronze, closed
oa_url	Direct link to the free full text where one exists
concepts	Up to 8 concept labels scoring 0.3 or above
referenced_works_count	How many works this one cites
language	Language code
openalex_url	Canonical OpenAlex URL
abstract	Reconstructed abstract, present when includeAbstract is on
scraped_at	ISO timestamp of capture

A final _type: "summary" record reports total_available, the count of works matching your filters across all of OpenAlex, next to how many you actually pulled.

How it works

The actor queries api.openalex.org/works with cursor pagination at 100 per page, sorted by cited_by_count:desc. Your inputs are translated into OpenAlex's filter syntax: from_publication_date, to_publication_date, cited_by_count:>N, type: and is_oa:true, comma-joined into a single filter string.

Every request carries a mailto parameter, which is how OpenAlex's polite pool works: identified traffic gets faster, more reliable service. No key is involved.

Abstracts are stored by OpenAlex as {word: [positions]}. The actor slots each word back into its positions and joins the result.

Each work is pushed to the dataset before the charge fires.

Who uses OpenAlex research paper data

Literature reviews. A topic plus a citation floor plus a year range gives you a defensible shortlist in one run instead of an afternoon of database tabs.

R&D and competitive intelligence. author_institutions shows which labs and companies are publishing in a field, and concepts shows what they are converging on.

Open-access sourcing. openAccessOnly plus oa_url builds a corpus you can legally read and process in full.

Bibliometrics. Citation counts, venue types and reference counts across a filtered slice of the literature.

What it costs

One pay-per-event charge, work-scraped, billed per work that actually lands in your dataset. Your rate depends on your own Apify discount tier:

Your Apify tier	Per work	Per 1,000
FREE	$0.0025	$2.50
BRONZE	$0.0021	$2.10
SILVER	$0.0018	$1.80
GOLD / PLATINUM / DIAMOND	$0.0015	$1.50

Nothing else is billed. Failed requests, blocked pages, empty searches and error records are never charged, so a run that returns no works costs nothing. There is no subscription and no monthly minimum.

Run it on a schedule

Scheduled runs are the pattern most people end up on: smaller, more frequent runs finish faster, keep the data fresh, and cost exactly the same per record as one big run.

1. On this actor's page, click ... -> Schedule Actor (or Console -> Schedules -> Create new).
2. Pick a frequency. @daily suits most standing queries.
3. Your saved input is reused on every run and each run appends to the dataset.
4. Wire the dataset to Google Sheets, Slack, or a webhook from the Integrations tab so new rows reach you without you looking.

FAQ

Do I need an OpenAlex API key? No. OpenAlex is free and keyless. The actor identifies itself with a mailto to join the polite pool, which is faster and more reliable than anonymous access.

Is the abstract always available? No. OpenAlex has abstracts for a large share of works but not all of them. When one is missing, the abstract field is absent from the record rather than empty.

How are results ordered? By citation count, descending. So a small maxResults still returns the most influential matching work.

What does oa_status mean? OpenAlex's open-access colour classification: gold, green, hybrid, bronze or closed. oa_url gives you the actual free full text when one exists.

Why are only 8 concepts returned? Concepts are filtered to those OpenAlex scores at 0.3 or above and capped at 8, because the long tail below that is noise.

Can I search without a term? Yes. Leave searchTerm empty and use only the year, citation and type filters to pull a slice of the graph.

How many works can I pull in one run? Cursor pagination has no offset ceiling, so maxResults is the real limit. Check total_available in the summary to see how much is out there.

Use it from Claude, ChatGPT and any MCP agent

Hosted MCP endpoint, no install, OAuth on first connect:

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=themineworks/openalex-scholarly-works

Claude Desktop / Cursor config with token auth:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "openalex": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=themineworks/openalex-scholarly-works",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" }
    }
  }
}

Or call it from code with the Apify client:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('themineworks/openalex-scholarly-works').call({
  "searchTerm": "retrieval augmented generation",
  "fromYear": 2023,
  "minCitations": 10,
  "maxResults": 100
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Related actors

• Crossref Scholarly Metadata: publisher-deposited metadata and DOIs.
• PubMed Scraper: biomedical literature from NCBI.
• arXiv Preprint Search: preprints before they are published.
• OpenCitations Citation Graph: the open citation network itself.
• NIH RePORTER Grants: the funding behind the research.

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Disclaimer: This actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by OurResearch or the OpenAlex project. It uses the public OpenAlex API. Scholarly metadata is licensed CC0 by OpenAlex.

Found a bug or want a field added? Open an issue from the actor's Apify Console page or reach out through the The Mine Works profile.

Related guides

• Five Scholarly Databases in One Call: OpenAlex, Crossref, arXiv, PubMed and OpenCitations
• Literature Reviews and R&D Intelligence at Scale with the OpenAlex Scraper
• OpenAlex API: 250 Million Research Papers, Free, No Rate-Limit Workarounds Needed

Last verified: 2026-08