Academic Paper Search & Citations (OpenAlex Scholarly API)

Search 250M+ scholarly works and export clean, flat records: title, DOI, authors with ORCID, institutions, venue, citation count, open-access PDF link, reconstructed abstract, topics and more. No API key, no scraping, no proxies.

What it does

• Search by keyword, title, author, institution, or a list of DOIs
• Filter by year range, open access only, minimum citations; sort by relevance, citations, newest or oldest
• Citing papers mode: every paper that cites a given DOI
• References mode: every paper a given DOI cites
• Optional Crossref enrichment (volume, pages, funders, licenses)
• Full-text abstracts rebuilt from OpenAlex's inverted index, ready for LLMs

Use cases

• Literature reviews and citation chaining (snowballing forward and backward)
• RAG pipelines and AI agents that need abstracts and open-access PDF URLs
• Bibliometrics: top-cited papers by author, institution or topic
• Finding open-access full texts for a reading list of DOIs
• Monitoring new publications on a research topic

Input example

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "retrieval augmented generation",
  "fromYear": 2020,
  "openAccessOnly": true,
  "minCitations": 50,
  "sortBy": "citations",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Citing papers: {"mode":"citing","targetDoi":"10.1038/nature14539","maxResults":200} DOI lookup: {"dois":["10.1038/nature14539","10.1145/3292500.3330701"]}

Output example

{
  "title": "Active Retrieval Augmented Generation",
  "doi": "10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.495",
  "year": 2023,
  "authors": [{ "name": "Zhengbao Jiang", "orcid": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0315-6727" }],
  "institutions": [{ "name": "Carnegie Mellon University", "country": "US", "ror": "https://ror.org/05x2bcf33" }],
  "venue": "Proceedings of EMNLP",
  "citationCount": 462,
  "referencedWorksCount": 40,
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "oaStatus": "hybrid",
  "pdfUrl": "https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.495.pdf",
  "abstract": "Despite the remarkable ability of large language models ...",
  "topics": ["Topic Modeling"],
  "openalexUrl": "https://openalex.org/W..."
}

Export as JSON, CSV, Excel or via the API.

Pricing

Pay per result: about $1.50 per 1,000 papers ($0.0015 each). You only pay for papers returned. Set Max results and the run's maximum cost to stay in control.

FAQ

Where does the data come from? OpenAlex, an open catalog released under the CC0 license. Crossref is used only if you enable enrichment. Is it legal? Yes. It uses the official public APIs with the polite-pool identification they request. Why is an abstract missing? Some publishers do not allow OpenAlex to distribute abstracts. Why is the PDF URL empty? Only open-access papers have one. How many results can I get? Up to 100,000 per run via cursor paging. How fresh is it? OpenAlex updates continuously.

Built by Winters Works. Issues and feature requests are welcome in the Issues tab.

Is it legal? (public data only)

Yes, in the sense that it only reads public or official data: the open OpenAlex and Crossref APIs. It does not log in, bypass paywalls or access private data. You remain responsible for how you use the results, including privacy, copyright and marketing laws. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the data sources.

Quick start and cost

Run it with the prefilled input to see sample output in seconds; the default run costs only a few cents at most. Then adjust the input and schedule it.

Use from code and AI agents

Call it from any language with the Apify API, or let an AI agent find and run it through the Apify MCP server.

from apify_client import ApifyClient
run = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>").actor("wintersworks/scholarly-paper-search").call(run_input={"mode": "search", "query": "large language models", "maxResults": 25})
items = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>").dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).list_items().items

Results land in the run's dataset (JSON, CSV, Excel). Set a maximum charge per run in the run options to cap spend.

About

Built and maintained by Winters Works. Questions or feature requests: open an issue on the Actor page or email wintersworks.shop@gmail.com.