About the data
Last updated
Last updated
OpenAlex is more than just a catalog of research publications. We do the work of disambiguating and connecting scholarly works, authors, institutions, sources, and other entities. We then offer the data and analytics on top of it in three different channels, depending on your needs:
OpenAlex Web — Our friendly web user interface
OpenAlex API — A fast, modern REST API to get the data programmatically
Data Snapshot — A periodic snapshot of the data, available to download in its entirety, for free
At the heart of OpenAlex is our dataset—a catalog of works. A work is any sort of scholarly output. A research article is one kind of work, but there are others such as datasets, books, and dissertations. We keep track of these works—their titles (and abstracts and full text in many cases), when they were created, etc. But that's not all we do. We also keep track of the connections between these works, finding associations through things like journals, authors, institutional affiliations, citations, topics, and funders. There are hundreds of millions of works out there, and tens of thousands more being created every day, so it's important that we have these relationships to help us make sense of research at a large scale.
OpenAlex aggregates and standardizes data from a whole bunch of other great projects, like a river fed by many tributaries. Our two most important data sources are MAG and Crossref. Other key sources include:
Web crawls
Works: Scholarly documents like journal articles, books, datasets, and theses
Authors: People who create works
Sources: Where works are hosted (such as journals, conferences, and repositories)
Institutions: Universities and other organizations to which authors claim affiliations
Concepts: Topics assigned to works
Publishers: Companies and organizations that distribute works
Funders: Organizations that fund research
Geo: Where things are in the world
