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Autocomplete entities
The autocomplete endpoint lets you add autocomplete or typeahead components to your applications, without the overhead of hosting your own API endpoint.
Each endpoint takes a string, and (very quickly) returns a list of entities that match that string.
Here's an example of an autocomplete component that lets users quickly select an institution:

A user looking for information on the flagship of Florida's state university system.
The autocomplete endpoint is very fast; queries generally return in around 200ms. If you'd like to see it in action, we're using a slightly-modified version of this endpoint in the OpenAlex website here: https://explore.openalex.org/
The format for requests is simple:
/autocomplete/<entity_type>?q=<query>
entity_type
(optional): the name of one of the OpenAlex entities:works
,authors
,sources
,institutions
,concepts
,publishers
, orfunders
.query
: the search string supplied by the user.
Each request returns a response object with two properties:
meta
: an object with information about the request, including timing and results countresults
: a list of up to ten results for the query, sorted by citation count. Each result represents an entity that matched against the query.
{
meta: {
count: 183,
db_response_time_ms: 5,
page: 1,
per_page: 10
},
results: [
{
id: "https://openalex.org/I33213144",
display_name: "University of Florida",
hint: "Gainesville, USA",
cited_by_count: 17190001,
entity_type: "institution",
external_id: "https://ror.org/02y3ad647"
},
// more results...
]
}
Each object in the
results
list includes these properties:display_name
(string): The entity'sdisplay_name
property.entity_type
(string): The entity's type:author
,concept
,institution
,source
,publisher
,funder
, orwork
.cited_by_count
(integer): The entity'scited_by_count
property. For works this is simply the number of incoming citations. For other entities, it's the sum of incoming citations for all the works linked to that entity.works_count
(integer): The number of works associated with the entity. For entity typework
it's always null.hint
: Some extra information that can help identify the right item. Differs by entity type.
Result objects have a
hint
property. You can show this to users to help them identify which item they're selecting. This is particularly helpful when the display_name
values of different results are the same, as often happens when autocompleting an author entity--a user who types in John Smi
is going to see a lot of identical-looking results, even though each one is a different person.The content of the
hint
property varies depending on what kind of entity you're looking up:Work
: The work's authors' display names, concatenated. e.g. "R. Alexander Pyron, John J. Wiens"Author
: The author's last known institution, e.g. "University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA"Source
: Thehost_organization
, e.g. "Oxford University Press"Institution
: The institution's location, e.g. "Gainesville, USA"
Canonical External IDs and OpenAlex IDs are detected within autocomplete queries and matched to the appropriate record if it exists. For example:
- The query
https://api.openalex.org/autocomplete?q=https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7436-3176
will search for the author with ORCID IDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-7436-3176
and return 0 records if it does not exist. - The query
https://api.openalex.org/autocomplete/sources?q=S49861241
will search for the source with OpenAlex IDhttps://openalex.org/S49861241
and return 0 records if it does not exist.
Last modified 3d ago