Paging

You can see executable examples of paging in this user-contributed Jupyter notebook!

Basic paging

Use the page query parameter to control which page of results you want (eg page=1, page=2, etc). By default there are 25 results per page; you can use the per-page parameter to change that to any number between 1 and 200.

• Get the 2nd page of a list: https://api.openalex.org/works?page=2

• Get 200 results on the second page: https://api.openalex.org/works?page=2&per-page=200

Basic paging only works for to read the first 10,000 results of any list. If you want to see more than 10,000 results, you'll need to use cursor paging.

Cursor paging

Cursor paging is a bit more complicated than basic paging, but it allows you to access as many records as you like.

To use cursor paging, you request a cursor by adding the cursor=* parameter-value pair to your query.

• Get a cursor in order to start cursor pagination: https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=publication_year:2020&per-page=100&cursor=*

The response to your query will include a next_cursor value in the response's meta object. Here's what it looks like:

{
  "meta": {
    "count": 8695857,
    "db_response_time_ms": 28,
    "page": null,
    "per_page": 100,
    "next_cursor": "IlsxNjA5MzcyODAwMDAwLCAnaHR0cHM6Ly9vcGVuYWxleC5vcmcvVzI0ODg0OTk3NjQnXSI="
  },
  "results" : [
    // the first page of results
  ]
}

To retrieve the next page of results, copy the meta.next_cursor value into the cursor field of your next request.

• Get the next page of results using a cursor value: https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=publication_year:2020&per-page=100&cursor=IlsxNjA5MzcyODAwMDAwLCAnaHR0cHM6Ly9vcGVuYWxleC5vcmcvVzI0ODg0OTk3NjQnXSI=

This second page of results will have a new value for meta.next_cursor. You'll use this new value the same way you did the first, and it'll give you the second page of results. To get all the results, keep repeating this process until meta.next_cursor is null and the results set is empty.

Besides using cursor paging to get entities, you can also use it in group_by queries.

Don't use cursor paging to download the whole dataset.

• It's bad for you because it will take many days to page through a long list like /works or /authors.

• It's bad for us (and other users!) because it puts a massive load on our servers.

Instead, download everything at once, using the OpenAlex snapshot. It's free, easy, fast, and you get all the results in same format you'd get from the API.