OpenAlex is a fully open catalog of the global research system. It's named after the ancient Library of Alexandria and made by the nonprofit OurResearch.

The OpenAlex dataset describes scholarly entities and how those entities are connected to each other. There are five types of entities: works, authors, sources, institutions, concepts, publishers and geo.

Together, these make a huge web (or more technically, heterogeneous directed graph) of hundreds of millions of entities and billions of connections between them all.

The API is the primary way to get OpenAlex data. It's free and requires no authentication. For best performance, add your email to all API requests, like [email protected].

There's no officially-supported client library for the API, for now. However, there are several third-party libraries you can use (and if you know of others, give us a shout):

• openalexR (R)
• OpenAlexAPI (Python)
• diophila (Python)
• PyAlex (Python)

If you're looking for a visual interface, you can also check out the free VOSviewer, which lets you make network visualizations based on OpenAlex data:

For tech support and bug reports, please visit our help page. You can follow us on Twitter at @OpenAlex_org.

If you use OpenAlex in research, please cite this paper:

Priem, J., Piwowar, H., & Orr, R. (2022). OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts. ArXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01833