OpenAlex is a fully open catalog of the global research system. It's named after the ancient Library of Alexandria.
The OpenAlex dataset describes scholarly entities and how those entities are connected to each other. There are five types of entities:
- 📄 Works are papers, books, datasets, etc; they cite other works
- 👩 Authors are people who create works
- 📚 Venues are journals and repositories that host works
- 🏫 Institutions are universities and other orgs that are affiliated with works (via authors)
- 💡 Concepts tag Works with a topic
Together, these make a huge web (or more technically, heterogeneous directed graph) of of hundreds of millions of entities and over a billion connections between them all.
There are three ways to access the OpenAlex dataset:
- the API
- the website (launching February 2022), and
- the database snapshot.
This documentation has sections for each of these three. There are also a section about the entity objects that make up OpenAlex, as well as information about the data more broadly, and of course a FAQ.
OpenAlex is made with love by OurResearch, with generous support from Arcadia—a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.