Get a single concept

These are the original OpenAlex Concepts, which are being deprecated in favor of Topics. We will continue to provide these Concepts for Works, but we will not be actively maintaining, updating, or providing support for these concepts. Unless you have a good reason to be relying on them, we encourage you to look into Topics instead.

It's easy to get a concept from the API with: /concepts/<entity_id>. Here's an example:

• Get the concept with the OpenAlex ID C71924100: https://api.openalex.org/concepts/C71924100

That will return a Concept object, describing everything OpenAlex knows about the concept with that ID:

{
    "id": "https://openalex.org/C71924100",
    "wikidata": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11190",
    "display_name": "Medicine",
    "level": 0,
    "description": "field of study for diagnosing, treating and preventing disease",
    // other fields removed for brevity
}

You can make up to 50 of these queries at once by requesting a list of entities and filtering on IDs using OR syntax.

External IDs

You can look up concepts using external IDs such as a wikidata ID:

• Get the concept with wikidata ID Q11190: https://api.openalex.org/concepts/wikidata:Q11190

Available external IDs for concepts are:

External ID	URN
Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG)	mag
Wikidata	wikidata

Select fields

You can use select to limit the fields that are returned in a concept object. More details are here.

• Display only the id and display_name for a concept object https://api.openalex.org/concepts/C71924100?select=id,display_name