Quickstart tutorial

Query the OpenAlex dataset using the magic of The Internet

Lets use the OpenAlex API to get journal articles and books published by authors at Stanford University. We'll limit our search to articles published between 2010 and 2020. Since OpenAlex is free and openly available, these examples work without any login or account creation. 👍

If you open these examples in a web browser, they will look much better if you have a browser plug-in such as JSONVue installed.

1. Find the institution

You can use the institutions endpoint to learn about universities and research centers. OpenAlex has a powerful search feature that searches across 108,000 institutions.

Lets use it to search for Stanford University:

• Find Stanford University https://api.openalex.org/institutions?search=stanford

Our first result looks correct (yeah!):

{
  "id": "https://openalex.org/I97018004",
  "ror": "https://ror.org/00f54p054",
  "display_name": "Stanford University",
  "country_code": "US",
  "type": "education",
  "homepage_url": "http://www.stanford.edu/"
  // other fields removed
}

We can use the ID https://openalex.org/I97018004 in that result to find out more.

→ This is an example of getting lists of entities

2. Get a single entity by ID

Once you have an ID, you can fetch that entity directly:

• Get Stanford University by ID https://api.openalex.org/institutions/I97018004

This returns the full institution object with all its details. You can do this with any entity type—works, authors, sources, etc.

→ This is an example of getting single entities

3. Find articles (works) associated with Stanford University

The works endpoint contains over 240 million articles, books, and theses 😲. We can filter to show works associated with Stanford.

• Show works where at least one author is associated with Stanford University https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=institutions.id:https://openalex.org/I97018004

This is just one of the 50+ ways that you can filter works!

→ This is an example of getting lists of entities

4. Filter works by publication year

Right now the list shows records for all years. Lets narrow it down to works that were published between 2010 to 2020, and sort from newest to oldest.

• Show works with publication years 2010 to 2020, associated with Stanford University https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=institutions.id:https://openalex.org/I97018004,publication_year:2010-2020&sort=publication_date:desc

5. Group works by publication year to show counts by year

Finally, you can group our result by publication year to get our final result, which is the number of articles produced by Stanford, by year from 2010 to 2020. There are more than 30 ways to group records in OpenAlex, including by publisher, journal, and open access status.

• Group records by publication year https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=institutions.id:https://openalex.org/I97018004,publication\_year:2010-2020\&group-by=publication\_year

That gives a result like this:

[
  {
    "key": "2020",
    "key_display_name": "2020",
    "count": 18627
  },
  {
    "key": "2019",
    "key_display_name": "2019",
    "count": 15933
  },
  {
    "key": "2017",
    "key_display_name": "2017",
    "count": 14789
  },
  ...
]

There you have it! This same technique can be applied to hundreds of questions around scholarly data. The data you received is under a CC0 license, so not only did you access it easily, you can share it freely! 🎉

→ This is an example of getting lists of entities

6. Find related works using semantic search

Sometimes you want to find works that are about the same topic, even if they use different terminology. OpenAlex's semantic search uses AI to find conceptually related works.

Let's find papers related to "machine learning applications in healthcare":

• Find semantically similar works https://api.openalex.org/find/works?query=machine+learning+applications+in+healthcare&api_key=YOUR_KEY

This will find relevant papers even if they use terms like "AI-driven medical diagnosis" or "deep learning for clinical data"—concepts that are related but use different words.

→ This is an example of finding similar works

7. Download full-text content

For many works, you can download the full-text PDF or structured XML:

• Download PDF for a work https://content.openalex.org/works/W2741809807.pdf

• Download TEI XML (parsed text with structure) https://content.openalex.org/works/W2741809807.tei.xml

Not all works have content available—check the has_content field on a work to see what's downloadable.

→ This is an example of getting content

Different service types have different credit costs. See Rate limits and authentication for details.

What's next?

Jump into an area of OpenAlex that interests you:

• Works

• Authors

• Sources

• Institutions

• Topics

• Publishers

• Funders

And check out our tutorials page for some hands-on examples!