OpenAlex Scraper

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Scrape OpenAlex — the free, open catalog of 250M+ scholarly works, authors, institutions, and concepts. Search papers, authors, or fetch by OpenAlex ID / DOI / PMID. Pulls citations, open-access status, abstracts, authorships, journals, topics. HTTP-only via the public api.openalex.org API. No auth, no proxy, no rate-limit drama (100k req/day in the polite pool).

What this actor does

• Four modes: searchWorks, searchAuthors, byWorkIds, byAuthorIds
• Universal IDs: OpenAlex (W…, A…), DOI, PMID, PMCID, ORCID — all auto-normalized
• Reconstructs abstracts from OpenAlex's inverted index (zero extra API calls)
• Filters: publication year range, min citation count, open-access only, work type
• Sorts: relevance, most cited, newest publication date / year
• Empty fields are omitted — no nulls reach the dataset

Output per work

• openalexId, doi, pmid, pmcid, magId — universal IDs
• title, publicationDate, publicationYear, type, language
• citedByCount, fwci (field-weighted citation impact), hasFulltext
• isOa, openAccessOaUrl, openAccessStatus, bestOaUrl
• venue — {name, issn_l, publisher, type, isOa, license}
• authorships[] — [{authorId, name, orcid, position, institutions}, ...] (when includeAuthorships=true)
• primaryAuthor — first author display name (always present scalar)
• concepts[] — top 10 OpenAlex concept tags (when includeConcepts=true)
• abstract — reconstructed text (when includeAbstract=true and OpenAlex has it)
• relevanceScore — search relevance score (search modes)
• openalexUrl — canonical link
• recordType: "work", scrapedAt

Output per author

• openalexId, name, orcid
• worksCount, citedByCount
• lastKnownInstitutions[]
• hIndex, i10Index
• openalexUrl, recordType: "author", scrapedAt

Input

Example: top-cited LLM papers from 2024

{
"mode":"searchWorks",
"searchQuery":"large language models",
"publicationYearMin":2024,
"minCitedBy":50,
"sortBy":"cited_by_count:desc",
"maxItems":100
}

Example: lookup specific papers by DOI

{
"mode":"byWorkIds",
"workIds":[
"10.1145/3442188.3445922",
"https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.06825",
"pmid:25524000"
]
}

Example: all works by an author (Geoffrey Hinton)

{
"mode":"byAuthorIds",
"authorIds":["A1969205038"],
"minCitedBy":100,
"maxItems":200
}

Example: open-access ML papers only

{
"mode":"searchWorks",
"searchQuery":"machine learning fairness",
"openAccessOnly":true,
"workType":"article",
"publicationYearMin":2020
}

Use cases

• Literature reviews — bulk-export every paper matching a topic across all disciplines
• Citation tracking — find the most-cited works on a topic, or all works citing a specific paper
• Author intelligence — track an author's publication record, h-index, institutional affiliations
• Open-access auditing — find OA copies of every paper in a reading list
• Topic monitoring — schedule recurring runs to catch new papers in your area
• Cross-database enrichment — feed DOIs from arXiv / PubMed / Crossref → enrich with OpenAlex citations

FAQ

What's OpenAlex? An open replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph: 250M+ scholarly works, 80M+ authors, free for any use, fully indexed by content+citations. See openalex.org.

Is there a rate limit? Yes — 100k requests/day in the polite pool (anyone with an email in their User-Agent). The actor sets this header automatically.

Why are abstracts sometimes missing? OpenAlex omits abstracts when their license doesn't permit redistribution. The actor returns whatever's available; missing abstracts mean the source publisher doesn't allow it.

How does it differ from arXiv / PubMed? OpenAlex is broader — covers all disciplines, all sources (preprint servers, journals, books, datasets). arXiv only covers preprints in physics/math/CS. PubMed only covers biomedical literature.

What ID formats are accepted? OpenAlex IDs (W123…, A123…), full DOI URLs (https://doi.org/10.1145/...), bare DOIs (10.1145/...), pmid:N, pmcid:N, and ORCIDs (0000-0001-…).

What's fwci? Field-weighted citation impact — a paper's citation count normalized to its field's average. 1.0 = field average, 2.0 = twice field average, etc. Useful for cross-discipline comparison.

Why is concepts capped at 10? OpenAlex assigns dozens of low-confidence concepts per work. We keep the top 10 (already sorted by score) for table display compactness; the full list is in OpenAlex's web UI.

How fresh is the data? Daily — OpenAlex re-indexes nightly from Crossref, PubMed, ORCID, ROR, etc.