OpenAlex Research Papers Monitor: Search + New Papers

Use this to search scholarly papers in OpenAlex and monitor a topic or author for new papers, with citations, open-access links and abstracts.

Beta. Search scholarly papers by keyword, author, institution, topic and year, with citation counts, open-access links and readable abstracts, or monitor a search and get only papers you have not seen before. Built on the official OpenAlex open API, local unit tests with recorded fixtures, and a live check of the API before release. Open an issue on the Issues tab if a field looks wrong and we fix it fast.

What it does

1. Search. Keyword and/or filters: authors, institutions, topics, publication years, minimum citations, open access only, work type. Sort by relevance, citations, newest or oldest.
2. Exact lookup. Give DOIs and get those papers.
3. Monitor mode. Tick "only new since last run" and schedule the actor (daily or weekly). Papers delivered before are remembered in a named key-value store, so a repeat run with nothing new returns and charges nothing.

Abstracts are rebuilt from OpenAlex's inverted-index format into plain text. Author, institution and topic names resolve to the best OpenAlex match; the matches are listed in the run's OUTPUT record so you can check them (pass an OpenAlex ID, ORCID or ROR id for an exact match).

Use cases

• Literature reviews and reading lists for a topic, ranked by citations.
• Competitor and lab tracking: new papers from an author or institution every week.
• Feeding abstracts and open-access PDF links into your own summarisation or RAG pipeline.
• Citation analysis for a field or research group.

Example input

{ "query": "graph neural networks", "yearFrom": 2022, "minCitations": 50, "openAccessOnly": true, "sortBy": "citations", "maxItems": 50 }

Monitor a topic weekly:

{ "query": "CRISPR base editing", "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true, "daysBack": 14, "maxItems": 100 }

Output fields

id, doi, title, publicationYear, publicationDate, type, language, citedByCount, isRetracted, isOpenAccess, openAccessStatus, openAccessUrl, pdfUrl, license, venue, authors (name, id, ORCID, position), institutions, topics, abstract, url, openAlexUrl, sourceRegistry, scrapedAt.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.002 per paper returned (about $2 per 1,000). Actor start $0.00005. Already-seen papers and searches with no match are free. Set Maximum cost per run to cap spend.

Data source and limits

All data comes from the official OpenAlex API (api.openalex.org), released under CC0. No scraping, no login. Without an OpenAlex API key, all keyless users on the same network share a small daily request budget; if it runs out the actor stops with a clear message. Paste a free key from openalex.org/settings/api into the optional input to avoid that. Citation counts and abstracts depend on what OpenAlex has indexed; some papers have no abstract. This actor is not affiliated with OpenAlex.

Output sample

Each result is one dataset item (JSON, CSV, Excel or via API). Shape taken from the actor's dataset schema; field names and meanings below, not live data:

Field	Meaning
title
publicationYear
citedByCount
isOpenAccess
venue
doi
openAccessUrl

FAQ

How do I try it quickly? Press Start with the prefilled input; it is a small run.

How is it priced? Pay per event; see the Pricing section above or the Pricing tab. A small run costs very little.

Is this a one-off or can it run on a schedule? Both. Use Apify schedules or the API to run it repeatedly.

What if the source is slow or fails? Failed or rate-limited requests (HTTP 429 or 5xx, network errors) are retried up to 4 attempts with growing waits; if a source stays unavailable the run records a warning instead of returning invented results.

Is the data legal to use? The actor reads public data. You are responsible for using the results in line with applicable law and the source's terms.

Alternatives to OpenAlex Papers Search + New Paper Alerts

Other ways to get similar data, so you can choose what fits:

• the OpenAlex API directly: free, you write the code
• Semantic Scholar API: free paper search API
• Google Scholar: manual, no official API

This actor's edge is pay-per-result pricing, no login and ready-to-use structured output. Compare on a small test run before you commit.

Changelog

• 0.2 (2026-10-28): listing refresh (title, description, README sections, console prefills). No change to output fields.
• Earlier: initial release.