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Authors

People who create works
Authors are people who create works. OpenAlex indexes about 213M authors, with thousands added daily. You can get an author from the API like this:
The Canonical External ID for authors is ORCID; only a small percentage of authors have one, but the percentage is higher for more recent works.
Our information about authors comes from MAG, Crossref, PubMed, ORCID, and publisher websites. We use an algorithm to disambiguate authors; this uses an author’s name, their publication record, their citation patterns, and (where available) their ORCID.
So for example, if J. Schmidt and John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt both write about 19th-century ketchup production, we’ll treat them as one author–but we won’t include the JJJ Schmidt who writes about weasel migration (even though his name is their name, too).
Authors are linked to works via the works.authorships property.

What's next

Learn more about what you can with authors: