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Get single entities
Get a single entity, based on an ID
It's easy to get a singleton entity object from from the API:
/<entity_name>/<entity_id>. Here's an example:That will return a
Work object, describing everything OpenAlex knows about the work with that ID. You can use IDs other than OpenAlex IDs, and you can also format the IDs in different ways. Read below to learn more.You can make up to 50 of these queries at once by requesting a list of entities and filtering on IDs using OR syntax.​
To get a single entity, you need a single unambiguous identifier, like an ORCID or an OpenAlex ID. If you've got an ambiguous identifier (like an author's name), you'll want to search instead.
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Supported IDs
For each entity type, you can retrieve the entity using by any of the external IDs we support--not just the native OpenAlex IDs. So for example:
- Get the work with this doi:
https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375: https://api.openalex.org/works/https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375​
This works with DOIs, ISSNs, ORCIDs, and lots of other IDs...in fact, you can use any ID listed in an entity's
ids property, as listed below:ID formats
Most of the external IDs OpenAlex supports are canonically expressed as URLs...for example, the canonical form of a DOI always starts with
https://doi.org/. You can always use these URL-style IDs in the entity endpoints. Examples:- Get the institution with the ROR https://ror.org/02y3ad647 (University of Florida):
https://api.openalex.org/institutions/https://ror.org/02y3ad647​ - Get the author with the ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1613-5981 (Heather Piwowar):
https://api.openalex.org/authors/https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1613-5981​
For simplicity and clarity, you may also want to express those IDs in a simpler, URN-style format, and that's supported as well; you just write the namespace of the ID, followed by the ID itself. Here are the same examples from above, but in the namespace:id format:
- Get the institution with the ROR https://ror.org/02y3ad647 (University of Florida):
https://api.openalex.org/institutions/ror:02y3ad647​ - Get the author with the ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1613-5981 (Heather Piwowar):
https://api.openalex.org/authors/orcid:0000-0003-1613-5981​
Finally, if you're using an OpenAlex ID, you can be even more succinct, and just use the Key part of the ID all by itself, the part that looks like
w1234567:- Get the work with OpenAlex ID https://openalex.org/W2741809807: https://api.openalex.org/works/W2741809807​
Random entity
You can get a random entity by using the string
random where an ID would normally go. OMG that's so random! Each time you call this URL you'll get a different entity. Examples:Last modified 17d ago
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