Search topics

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

• Search topics' display_name and description for "artificial intelligence": https://api.openalex.org/topics?search=artificial intelligence

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 topics with "medical" in the display_name: https://api.openalex.org/topics?filter=display_name.search:medical

The following fields can be searched as a filter within topics:

Search filter	Field that is searched
display_name.search	display_name
description.search	description
keywords.search	keywords

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