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OpenAlex Scholarly Works Scraper — Papers, Authors, Citations & Venues

Search 250M+ scholarly works from OpenAlex — the open index of the world's research — and get clean, structured JSON back. Filter by topic, year, citation count, open-access status and work type, and pull authors, institutions, venues, citations, concepts and reconstructed abstracts. Built for research and competitive intelligence, literature reviews, bibliometrics, R&D landscaping, and AI/RAG pipelines over scientific text. You only pay for works actually delivered.

Keywords: OpenAlex API, scholarly data, research papers scraper, citation data, bibliometrics, literature review automation, academic search API, science intelligence, paper metadata.

Why this actor

OpenAlex is the free, open successor to Microsoft Academic Graph — a complete index of papers, authors, institutions, venues and citations. Its API is powerful but returns deeply structured records (nested authorships, inverted-index abstracts, scored concepts) and uses cursor pagination. This actor flattens all of that into one clean record per work:

• Full-text search across titles, abstracts and fulltext.
• Filters — publication year range, minimum citations, work type, open-access only.
• Flat, analysis-ready output — title, DOI, year, type, authors, institutions, venue, citation count, open-access status, top concepts, language and a direct link.
• Reconstructed abstracts — OpenAlex stores abstracts as an inverted index; this actor rebuilds readable abstract text on request.
• Fully open, no API key — official OpenAlex API, joined to its fast "polite pool."

What you can build with it

• R&D and competitive intelligence — map who is publishing on a technology, where, and how often it is cited.
• Literature reviews — assemble a filtered, citation-ranked corpus on a topic in seconds.
• Bibliometrics & trends — quantify research output by year, institution or concept.
• Talent & partner scouting — find the most-cited authors and institutions in a field.
• AI / RAG pipelines — ingest titles and abstracts as grounded scientific context.

Input

Example input

{
"searchTerm":"perovskite solar cells",
"fromYear":2022,
"minCitations":25,
"openAccessOnly":true,
"includeAbstract":true,
"maxResults":200
}

Output

Each work is one dataset record:

{
"openalex_id":"https://openalex.org/W2064815984",
"doi":"https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1231143",
"title":"Multiplex Genome Engineering Using CRISPR/Cas Systems",
"publication_year":2013,
"type":"article",
"cited_by_count":15686,
"authors":["Le Cong","F. Ann Ran"],
"author_institutions":["Broad Institute","MIT"],
"venue":"Science",
"is_open_access":false,
"oa_status":"closed",
"concepts":["CRISPR","Genome editing","Cas9"],
"language":"en",
"openalex_url":"https://openalex.org/W2064815984",
"scraped_at":"2026-06-10T15:00:00.000Z"
}

abstract is included when includeAbstract is on. A final {"_type": "summary"} record reports how many works were returned and how many matched in total.

Pricing

Your first 25 works are free — every Apify account, no card, no trial clock. After that it is a flat $0.002 per work delivered.

• First 25 works free per account (lifetime), then $0.002/work ($2 per 1,000)
• Zero charge on empty runs — a search that matches nothing costs you nothing
• No monthly minimum, no rental

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. OpenAlex is fully open; this actor uses its fast polite pool.

How many works are indexed? Over 250 million, across all fields of research.

Can I get abstracts? Yes — turn on includeAbstract and the actor reconstructs readable abstract text from OpenAlex's inverted index.

How do I get the most-cited papers on a topic? Just set searchTerm (and optionally minCitations); results are returned most-cited first.