OpenAlex Scholarly Works Scraper: Papers, Citations, Abstracts

Search 250 million+ research papers, preprints, books and datasets from OpenAlex, the open catalog of the global research system, and get clean rows with title, DOI, authors with ORCID and affiliations, journal/venue, ISSN, citation counts, open-access PDF links, license, topics, keywords and the full abstract. Every field of science, every publisher, not just preprint servers.

$0.80 per 1,000 works. No login, no proxy, no API key needed for normal runs. It reads the official OpenAlex API, so it is fast (about 100 works per second of API time) and stable.

What you can do with it

• Literature reviews and systematic searches: pull every paper on a topic with year, type, open-access and citation filters, then screen in a spreadsheet.
• Citation and impact analysis: rank papers by citations or field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) for a topic, author or institution.
• Research intelligence and lead lists: find who publishes on a topic, with ORCID, institution and country for every author.
• Open-access PDF harvesting: get OA links and PDF URLs for papers that are free to read.
• DOI enrichment: paste a list of DOIs and get full metadata, abstracts and citation counts back.
• AI and RAG pipelines: feed titles and abstracts into embeddings, classifiers or LLM agents.

How to use

1. Type one or more search queries, one per line (or an author, an institution, or a list of DOIs).
2. Optionally add filters: years, work type, open access only, minimum citations, language, sort order.
3. Click Start and download the results as JSON, CSV, Excel, or pull them through the Apify API.

Input

Field	What it does
queries	Searches to run, one per line (e.g. a topic list for a literature review). Supports AND, OR, NOT and "exact phrases". Each result says which search found it (searchQuery); a work found by two searches is returned once.
query	One search (same as one line of queries; kept for existing API callers).
searchIn	Title and abstract (default), title only, or full text too.
dois	List of DOIs to look up. When set, returns exactly these works.
authorName	Author name, ORCID or OpenAlex author id. Applies to every search.
institutionName	Institution name, ROR id or OpenAlex institution id.
yearFrom / yearTo	Publication year range.
type	Article, preprint, review, book, chapter, conference paper, dataset, dissertation...
openAccessOnly	Only works that are free to read.
minCitations	Only works cited at least N times.
language	Two-letter code, e.g. en.
sortBy	relevance, citations (most cited) or date (newest).
includeAbstract	Adds the abstract (default on).
excludeRetracted	Skips retracted works (default on).
maxItems	Cap on results per search (default 50, max 10,000). Set a maximum charge per run for a hard total.
apiKey	Optional free OpenAlex key for big or frequent runs (see Limits).

Example:

{
  "queries": ["perovskite solar cells", "tandem solar cells stability"],
  "yearFrom": 2022,
  "openAccessOnly": true,
  "minCitations": 50,
  "sortBy": "citations",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Output

One item per work:

{
  "openalexId": "W2919115771",
  "doi": "10.1038/nature14539",
  "title": "Deep learning",
  "publicationYear": 2015,
  "publicationDate": "2015-05-26",
  "type": "article",
  "language": "en",
  "authors": [{"name": "Yann LeCun", "orcid": "0000-0002-1992-2684", "position": "first",
               "isCorresponding": true, "institutions": ["Meta (United States)", "New York University"], "countries": ["US"]}],
  "authorNames": ["Yann LeCun", "Yoshua Bengio", "Geoffrey E. Hinton"],
  "firstAuthor": "Yann LeCun",
  "venue": "Nature", "publisher": "Nature Portfolio", "issn": "0028-0836",
  "volume": "521", "issue": "7553", "pages": "436-444",
  "isOA": true, "oaStatus": "green", "oaUrl": "https://hal.science/hal-04206682", "pdfUrl": null, "license": null,
  "citedByCount": 84498, "fwci": 3080.03, "referencedWorksCount": 54, "isRetracted": false,
  "primaryTopic": "Neural Networks and Applications", "field": "Computer Science", "subfield": "Artificial Intelligence",
  "topics": ["Neural Networks and Applications", "..."], "keywords": ["deep learning", "backpropagation"],
  "funders": [], "pmid": "26017442",
  "abstract": "Deep learning allows computational models that are composed of multiple processing layers ...",
  "landingUrl": "https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539",
  "openalexUrl": "https://openalex.org/W2919115771",
  "source": "OpenAlex (CC0)",
  "searchQuery": "deep learning"
}

Field	Meaning
citedByCount, fwci	Citations received; field-weighted citation impact (1.0 = world average for the field and year).
isOA, oaStatus, oaUrl, pdfUrl, license	Open-access status and the best free-to-read link OpenAlex knows.
primaryTopic, field, subfield, topics	OpenAlex topic classification (top 3 topics).
abstract	Rebuilt from OpenAlex's abstract index; null when the publisher does not provide one.

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.80 per 1,000 works (work-scraped event). Filters and caps are applied before you are charged, so you pay only for works you receive. A run that finds nothing fails with a clear message instead of returning an empty dataset.

Limits and notes

• OpenAlex meters API use. Keyless callers share a small daily budget (about 20,000 search results a day per IP). For large or frequent runs, paste your own free OpenAlex API key (openalex.org/settings/api) into apiKey; it raises the budget 10x and is never logged. If the budget runs out mid-run, the works already returned are kept, the run says it stopped early, and the SUMMARY record lists every search with how many works matched and how many were returned.
• Search matches titles and abstracts by default; switch searchIn to full text for wider recall. Very broad queries match millions of works; use maxItems and filters (each search reaches its first 10,000 results).
• An author name resolves to the main OpenAlex profile with exactly that name (most works), not just the first search hit, and the match is shown in the log and SUMMARY. Common names can belong to several people: for an exact person, use their ORCID.
• Some DOIs are listed under a related DOI (for example an arXiv preprint and its published version); unknown DOIs are skipped.
• Abstracts are missing for some publishers that do not share them.

Data source and credit

Data from OpenAlex (OurResearch), released under the CC0 public-domain dedication. Attribution is not required, but credit is appreciated: Priem, J., Piwowar, H., & Orr, R. (2022). OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts. arXiv:2205.01833.

This actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by OpenAlex or OurResearch.