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 use biorxiv-database

Prerequisites