Search publishers

The best way to search for publishers is to use the search query parameter, which searches the display_name and alternate_titles fields. Example:

• Search publishers' display_name and alternate_titles for "springer": https://api.openalex.org/publishers?search=springer

You can read more about search here. It will show you how relevance score is calculated, how words are stemmed to improve search results, and how to do complex boolean searches.

Search a specific field

You can also use search as a filter, allowing you to fine-tune the fields you're searching over. To do this, you append .search to the end of the property you are filtering for:

• Get publishers with "elsevier" in the display_name: https://api.openalex.org/publishers?filter=display_name.search:elsevier

The following field can be searched as a filter within publishers:

Search filter	Field that is searched
display_name.search	display_name

You can also use the filter default.search, which works the same as using the search parameter.

Autocomplete publishers

You can autocomplete publishers to create a very fast type-ahead style search function:

• Autocomplete publishers with "els" in the display_name: https://api.openalex.org/autocomplete/publishers?q=els

This returns a list of publishers:

{ 
  "results": [
    {
        "id": "https://openalex.org/P4310320990",
        "display_name": "Elsevier BV",
        "hint": null,
        "cited_by_count": 407508754,
        "works_count": 20311868,
        "entity_type": "publisher",
        "external_id": "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q746413"
    },
    ...
  ]
}

Read more in the autocomplete page in the API guide.