Get lists of concepts

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.

You can get lists of concepts:

• Get all concepts in OpenAlex https://api.openalex.org/concepts

Which returns a response like this:

{
    "meta": {
        "count": 65073,
        "db_response_time_ms": 26,
        "page": 1,
        "per_page": 25
    },
    "results": [
        {
            "id": "https://openalex.org/C41008148",
            "wikidata": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21198",
            "display_name": "Computer science",
            // more fields (removed to save space)
        },
        {
            "id": "https://openalex.org/C71924100",
            "wikidata": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11190",
            "display_name": "Medicine",
            // more fields (removed to save space)
        },
        // more results (removed to save space)
    ],
    "group_by": []
}

Page and sort concepts

By default we return 25 results per page. You can change this default and page through concepts with the per-page and page parameters:

• Get the second page of concepts results, with 50 results returned per page https://api.openalex.org/concepts?per-page=50&page=2

You also can sort results with the sort parameter:

• Sort concepts by cited by count, descending https://api.openalex.org/concepts?sort=cited_by_count:desc

Continue on to learn how you can filter and search lists of concepts.

Sample concepts

You can use sample to get a random batch of concepts. Read more about sampling and how to add a seed value here.

• Get 10 random concepts https://api.openalex.org/concepts?sample=10

Select fields

You can use select to limit the fields that are returned in a list of concepts. More details are here.

• Display only the id, display_name, and description within concepts results https://api.openalex.org/concepts?select=id,display_name,description