Get lists of topics

You can get lists of topics:

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

Which returns a response like this:

{
    "meta": {
        "count": 4516,
        "db_response_time_ms": 10,
        "page": 1,
        "per_page": 25,
        "groups_count": null
    },
    "results": [
        {
            "id": "https://openalex.org/T11475",
            "display_name": "Territorial Governance and Environmental Participation",
            // more fields (removed to save space)
        },
        {
            "id": "https://openalex.org/T13445",
            "display_name": "American Political Thought and History",
            // more fields (removed to save space)
        },
        // more results (removed to save space)
    ],
    "group_by": []
}

Page and sort topics

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

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

You also can sort results with the sort parameter:

• Sort topics by cited by count, descending https://api.openalex.org/topics?sort=cited\_by\_count:desc

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

Sample topics

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

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

Select fields

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

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