OpenAlex Scraper & API: Papers, Authors, Citations

What does OpenAlex Scraper & API do?

OpenAlex Scraper & API gets research papers, authors and citations from OpenAlex, the open catalog of the world's scholarly works (250M+ papers, books, preprints and datasets), as clean JSON, CSV or Excel, straight from the official OpenAlex API. No scraping, no proxies, no browser. The data is CC0 (public domain): use it for anything.

Three modes:

• Search papers: by keywords (title, abstract and keywords, or full text; AND / OR / NOT and "phrases"), publication year or date range, work type (article, review, preprint, book, dataset...), open access only, minimum citations, author (OpenAlex ID or ORCID), institution (ROR ID), author country, journal (ISSN), language, and papers that cite a given paper. Sort by relevance, most cited, newest or oldest.
• Look up papers: paste DOIs or OpenAlex IDs and get each paper as one row (50 per API call, any number per run).
• Search authors: by name, institution or country, with h-index, i10-index, works and citation counts, ORCID and last known institution.

Try it: open the Input tab, keep the example (large language models education) and click Start. A run takes a few seconds.

Why use it?

• Reliable: it calls OpenAlex's own API, the one openalex.org runs on. No HTML parsing, no proxy, no blocks. Errors in your filters come back with OpenAlex's own message and the run fails cleanly without charging for results.
• Past the 10,000-result wall: OpenAlex serves only the first 10,000 results of a query without an API key, and keyless calls share a tiny daily budget. With your own free API key and cursor paging, a 50,000-paper export works.
• Ready-to-use columns: title, DOI, year and date, type, journal, ISSN, publisher, all authors (with ORCID, position, institutions), institutions and countries, citation count, FWCI, open-access status, PDF and OA links, license, topic, field, keywords, PubMed ID, and the abstract as plain text (OpenAlex stores it as an index; the Actor rebuilds it).
• No per-minute surprises: $0.001 per result, platform usage included; capped by Max results.

How to use OpenAlex Scraper & API

1. Open the Input tab and pick What to get: works (papers), lookup (DOIs or OpenAlex IDs you already have) or authors.
2. Type a search query and narrow it as needed: years or dates, work types, open access only, minimum citations, authors (OpenAlex ID or ORCID), institutions (ROR), author countries, journals (ISSN), language. To list the papers citing a paper, put its ID in Cites this work.
3. Set Max results, add your own free OpenAlex key for large runs (see pricing below) and click Start.
4. Download the results from the Output tab as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read them through the Apify API. A weekly Schedule keeps a citation list current.

Use from Claude / any MCP client

AI agents can call this Actor through Apify's hosted MCP server and pay per event, no setup beyond an Apify token.

• MCP URL (one Actor as a tool): https://mcp.apify.com?tools=tuper/openalex-papers (older clients: https://mcp.apify.com?actors=tuper/openalex-papers)
• Auth: send your Apify API token as Authorization: Bearer <token>.
• Claude Code: claude mcp add --transport http apify-openalex-papers "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=tuper/openalex-papers" --header "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN"
• The tool is named tuper--openalex-papers. Example task: Get 10 open-access papers on large language models from 2024 on.
• Example tool arguments: {"mode": "works", "query": "large language models", "yearFrom": 2024, "openAccessOnly": true, "maxResults": 10}
• Read results with get-dataset-items and the datasetId the call returns. Set maxResults to cap the cost.

How much does it cost?

Pay per event: $0.001 per result ($1 per 1,000 results) plus a $0.00005 start fee. Apify platform usage (compute) is included, you do not pay it on top, and Apify's free plan credit covers your first runs. Set Max results and the Actor stops there.

OpenAlex itself is free for normal use. Without your own key the Actor uses OpenAlex's keyless access, whose daily budget is small and shared, so large runs need your own key. For bigger or frequent runs, add your own free OpenAlex API key (openalex.org/settings/api, 30 seconds): it gives you $1 of OpenAlex usage a day, about 100,000 search results or 1,000,000 filter-only results.

Input

Field	Used by	What it does
mode	all	works, lookup or authors
query	works, authors	keywords (works) or a person's name (authors); AND, OR, NOT, "quoted phrases"
searchIn	works	title_abstract_keywords (default, like openalex.org), title_and_abstract, or fulltext (broadest)
references	lookup	DOIs (10.1038/nature12373, doi.org links) or OpenAlex IDs (W2741809807)
yearFrom, yearTo, dateFrom, dateTo	works	publication year or exact date range
types	works	article, review, preprint, book, book-chapter, dataset, dissertation...
openAccessOnly	works	only works with a free full text
minCitations	works, authors	cited at least N times
authorIds, orcids	works	papers by these authors
institutionRors	works, authors	e.g. 03vek6s52 (Harvard); find IDs at ror.org
countries	works, authors	2-letter codes of the authors' institutions: US, DE, IL
journalIssns	works	e.g. 0028-0836 (Nature)
languages	works	en, de, es...
citesWorkIds	works	papers that cite these papers (a citation list)
titleSearch	works	words that must be in the title
excludeRetracted	works	on by default
extraFilter	works, authors	any raw OpenAlex filter, ANDed with the rest
sort	works, authors	relevance, citations, newest, oldest
includeAbstracts	works, lookup	on by default
maxResults	all	stop after this many rows (default 100)
apiKey	all	your own free OpenAlex key (stored as a secret)

Example: every 2025 article from Israeli institutions, most cited first:

{ "mode": "works", "yearFrom": 2025, "countries": ["IL"], "types": ["article"], "sort": "citations", "maxResults": 5000 }

Example: all papers citing one paper, newest first (citation tracking):

{ "mode": "works", "citesWorkIds": ["W2741809807"], "sort": "newest", "maxResults": 2000 }

Example: enrich a list of DOIs from your reference manager:

{ "mode": "lookup", "references": ["10.7717/peerj.4375", "10.1038/nature12373"] }

Example: the most-cited researchers at an institution:

{ "mode": "authors", "institutionRors": ["03vek6s52"], "minCitations": 1000, "maxResults": 300 }

Sample output

Most-cited open-access papers since 2024 matching "large language models" AND education (13,258 matches), from a real run on 1 Nov 2026:

Year	Title	First author	Journal	Cited by	OA	DOI
2024	A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models	Yupeng Chang	ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology	3,152	green	10.1145/3641289
2024	A Review on Large Language Models: Architectures, Applications, Ta...	Mohaimenul Azam Khan Raiaan	IEEE Access	936	gold	10.1109/access.2024.3365742
2024	The promise and challenges of generative AI in education	Michail N. Giannakos	Behaviour and Information Technology	541	hybrid	10.1080/0144929x.2024.2394886
2024	A multimodal generative AI copilot for human pathology	Ming Y. Lu	Nature	461	hybrid	10.1038/s41586-024-07618-3
2024	Application of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in langu...	Locky Law	Computers and Education Open	447	gold	10.1016/j.caeo.2024.100174
2024	Exploring students' perspectives on Generative AI-assisted academi...	Jinhee Kim	Education and Information Technologies	439	hybrid	10.1007/s10639-024-12878-7

One full row (trimmed):

{
  "openalexId": "W3015901506",
  "doi": "10.1163/9789004702813_021",
  "title": "The Difference between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning",
  "publicationYear": 2024,
  "publicationDate": "2024-09-25",
  "type": "book-chapter",
  "journal": "BRILL eBooks",
  "publisher": "Brill",
  "authors": "Charles B. Hodges; Stephanie L. Moore; Barbara B. Lockee; Torrey Trust; M. Aaron Bond",
  "authorList": [{ "name": "Charles B. Hodges", "openalexId": "A5088255068", "orcid": "0000-0003-3918-9261", "position": "first", "institutions": [] }],
  "citedByCount": 6253,
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "oaStatus": "green",
  "pdfUrl": "http://hdl.handle.net/10919/104648",
  "license": "cc-by-nc-nd",
  "topic": "Education during COVID-19 pandemic",
  "field": "Social Sciences",
  "keywords": ["emergency remote teaching", "online learning", "COVID-19 pandemic"],
  "openalexUrl": "https://openalex.org/W3015901506",
  "abstract": "Well-planned online learning experiences are meaningfully different from courses offered online in response to a crisis or disaster. ..."
}

Author rows (mode authors): name, orcid, worksCount, citedByCount, hIndex, i10Index, meanCitedness2yr, institution, institutionCountry, institutionRor, institutions, topTopics, alternativeNames, openalexUrl. Fields OpenAlex does not have for a record are null.

Use cases

• Literature reviews and meta-analyses: export every paper matching a search strategy, with abstracts, to screen in a spreadsheet or tool.
• Research analytics: an institution's or country's output, citations and open-access share by year.
• Citation tracking: who cites your paper or your lab's papers, refreshed on a schedule.
• Lead lists for publishers, recruiters and R&D sales: active authors in a field with ORCID and institution.
• RAG and AI agents: a clean, documented source of paper metadata and abstracts, callable per request.

Data source and terms

Data comes from the OpenAlex API by OurResearch. OpenAlex data is released under CC0 ("no 'personal use only' carve-out and no permission to ask", OpenAlex pricing page). Please cite OpenAlex in your work: 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 or endorsed by OpenAlex or OurResearch.

FAQ

Is this allowed? Yes. It uses the official OpenAlex API, and OpenAlex data is released under CC0 (see Data source and terms below). Please cite OpenAlex in your work.

Do I need an OpenAlex key? Not for small runs. Keyless access has a small daily budget shared with everyone and returns only the first 10,000 results of a query, so for large or frequent runs add your own free key (openalex.org/settings/api).

Can I use it from my code or an AI agent? Yes: call it through the Apify API, the Apify MCP server or any integration (Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets).

Something is wrong or missing? Open an issue on the Issues tab; we read every one.

Other official-API Actors by tuper

Same approach (official public APIs, no scraping, pay per result):

• Hacker News Scraper & API: stories, search, comment trees, Who is hiring jobs
• UK Companies House Scraper & API: UK companies, directors, PSC owners, filings
• EU TED Tenders Scraper & API: EU public procurement notices and contract awards
• GitHub Repo Scraper & API: repository search by language, topic, stars

Who made this

This Actor is built and maintained by an AI agent of Tuper, a small company run by AI agents with every number public. If something is wrong or missing, open an issue on the Issues tab.