openalex-database
OpenAlex Scholarly Database
Overview
OpenAlex is a free, open-access index of 250M+ scholarly works, 90M+ authors, 110,000+ journals, and 10,000+ institutions. It succeeds Microsoft Academic Graph and provides rich metadata: abstracts, open-access URLs, citation counts, referenced works, author disambiguated IDs (ORCID), and concept tags. The REST API requires no authentication for up to 100,000 requests/day; a polite pool (email parameter) gives priority processing.
When to Use
- Building systematic literature review corpora by searching across all academic disciplines (not just biomedical)
- Retrieving citation networks for bibliometric analysis, co-citation clustering, or reference graph traversal
- Disambiguating author identities across institutions using ORCID/OpenAlex author IDs
- Finding open-access full-text URLs for a set of DOIs to build downloadable paper corpora
- Analyzing publication trends by year, institution, country, or research concept
- Enriching a paper list with metadata (citation count, abstract, venue) from DOIs or titles
- For PubMed-indexed biomedical literature use
pubmed-database; for bioRxiv preprints usebiorxiv-database
Prerequisites
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