OpenAlex technical documentation
  • Overview
  • Quickstart tutorial
  • API Entities
    • Entities overview
    • 📄Works
      • Work object
        • Authorship object
        • Location object
      • Get a single work
      • Get lists of works
      • Filter works
      • Search works
      • Group works
      • Get N-grams
    • 👩Authors
      • Author object
      • Get a single author
      • Get lists of authors
      • Filter authors
      • Search authors
      • Group authors
      • Limitations
      • Author disambiguation
    • 📚Sources
      • Source object
      • Get a single source
      • Get lists of sources
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    • 🏫Institutions
      • Institution object
      • Get a single institution
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      • Group institutions
    • 💡Topics
      • Topic object
      • Get a single topic
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    • 🗝️Keywords
    • 🏢Publishers
      • Publisher object
      • Get a single publisher
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    • 💰Funders
      • Funder object
      • Get a single funder
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    • 🌎Geo
      • Continents
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    • Concepts
      • Concept object
      • Get a single concept
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    • Aboutness endpoint (/text)
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On this page
  • affiliations
  • cited_by_count
  • counts_by_year
  • created_date
  • display_name
  • display_name_alternatives
  • id
  • ids
  • last_known_institution (deprecated)
  • last_known_institutions
  • orcid
  • summary_stats
  • updated_date
  • works_api_url
  • works_count
  • x_concepts
  • The DehydratedAuthor object
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  1. API Entities
  2. Authors

Author object

PreviousAuthorsNextGet a single author

Last updated 9 months ago

When you use the API to get a or , this is what's returned.

affiliations

List: List of objects, representing the affiliations this author has claimed in their publications. Each object in the list has two properties:

  • institution: a object

  • years: a list of the years in which this author claimed an affiliation with this institution

affiliations: [
    {
        institution: {
            id: "https://openalex.org/I201448701",
            ror: "https://ror.org/00cvxb145",
            ...
        },
        years: [2018, 2019, 2020]
    },
    {
        institution: {
            id: "https://openalex.org/I74973139",
            ror: "https://ror.org/05x2bcf33",
            ...
        },
        years: [2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019]
    }
]

cited_by_count

cited_by_count: 38 

counts_by_year

Any works or citations older than ten years old aren't included. Years with zero works and zero citations have been removed so you will need to add those in if you need them.

counts_by_year: [
    {
        year: 2022,
        works_count: 0,
        cited_by_count: 8
    },
    {
        year: 2021,
        works_count: 1,
        cited_by_count: 252
    },
    ...
    {
        year: 2012,
        works_count: 7,
        cited_by_count: 79
    }
]

created_date

created_date: "2017-08-08"

display_name

String: The name of the author as a single string.

display_name: "Jason Priem"

display_name_alternatives

List: Other ways that we've found this author's name displayed.

display_name_alternatives: [
    "Jason R Priem"
]

id

String: The OpenAlex ID for this author.

id: "https://openalex.org/A5023888391"

ids

Object: All the external identifiers that we know about for this author. IDs are expressed as URIs whenever possible. Possible ID types:

  • twitter (String: this author's Twitter handle)

  • wikipedia (String: this author's Wikipedia page)

Most authors are missing one or more ID types (either because we don't know the ID, or because it was never assigned). Keys for null IDs are not displayed.

ids: {
    openalex: "https://openalex.org/A5023888391",
    orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6187-6610",
    scopus: "http://www.scopus.com/inward/authorDetails.url?authorID=36455008000&partnerID=MN8TOARS",
},

last_known_institution (deprecated)

last_known_institutions

last_known_institutions: [{
    id: "https://openalex.org/I4200000001",
    ror: "https://ror.org/02nr0ka47",
    display_name: "OurResearch",
    country_code: "CA",
    type: "nonprofit",
    lineage: ["https://openalex.org/I4200000001"]
}],

orcid

Compared to other Canonical IDs, ORCID coverage is relatively low in OpenAlex, because ORCID adoption in the wild has been slow compared with DOI, for example. This is particularly an issue when dealing with older works and authors.

orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6187-6610"

summary_stats

Object: Citation metrics for this author

While the 2-year mean citedness is normally a journal-level metric, it can be calculated for any set of papers, so we include it for authors.

summary_stats: {
    2yr_mean_citedness: 1.5295340589458237,
    h_index: 45,
    i10_index: 205
}

updated_date

updated_date: "2022-01-02T00:00:00"

works_api_url

String: A URL that will get you a list of all this author's works.

We express this as an API URL (instead of just listing the works themselves) because sometimes an author's publication list is too long to reasonably fit into a single author object.

works_api_url: "https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=author.id:A5023888391",

works_count

works_count: 38 

x_concepts

  • score (Float): The strength of association between this author and the listed concept, from 0-100.

x_concepts: [
    {
        id: "https://openalex.org/C41008148",
        wikidata: null,
        display_name: "Computer science",
        level: 0,
        score: 97.4
    },
    {
        id: "https://openalex.org/C17744445",
        wikidata: null,
        display_name: "Political science",
        level: 0,
        score: 78.9
    }
]

The DehydratedAuthor object

Integer: The total number that cite a work this author has created.

List: and for each of the last ten years, binned by year. To put it another way: each year, you can see how many works this author published, and how many times they got cited.

String: The date this Author object was created in the OpenAlex dataset, expressed as an date string.

openalex (String: this author's . Same as )

orcid (String: this author's . Same as )

scopus (String: this author's )

This field has been deprecated. Its replacement is .

List: List of Institution objects. This author's last known institutional affiliations. In this context "last known" means that we took all the author's , sorted them by publication date, and selected the most recent one. If there is only one affiliated institution for this author for the work, this will be a list of length 1; if there are multiple affiliations, they will all be included in the list.

Each item in the list is a object, and you can find more documentation on the page.

String: The for this author. ORCID is a global and unique ID for authors. This is the for authors.

2yr_mean_citedness Float: The 2-year mean citedness for this source. Also known as . We use the year prior to the current year for the citations (the numerator) and the two years prior to that for the citation-receiving publications (the denominator).

h_index Integer: The for this author.

i10_index Integer: The for this author.

String: The last time anything in this author object changed, expressed as an date string. This date is updated for any change at all, including increases in various counts.

Integer: The number of this this author has created.

This is updated a couple times per day. So the count may be slightly different than what's in works when viewed .

x_concepts will be deprecated and removed soon. We will be replacing this functionality with instead.

List: The concepts most frequently applied to works created by this author. Each is represented as a object, with one additional attribute:

The DehydratedAuthor is stripped-down object, with most of its properties removed to save weight. Its only remaining properties are:

👩
📄
Works
ISO 8601
Scopus author ID
Works
impact factor
h-index
i-10 index
ISO 8601
📄
Works
like this
Topics
Author.works_count
Author.cited_by_count
ORCID
ID
Author.orcid
last_known_institutions
Author
id
display_name
orcid
single author
lists of authors
Institution
ORCID
ID
Author.id
OpenAlex ID
Canonical external ID
dehydrated Concept
dehydrated Institution
dehydrated Institution