OpenAlex Scholarly Works Scraper

Search the open catalog of scholarly works via the OpenAlex API and get back clean, structured JSON for every paper — title, reconstructed abstract, authors and their institutions, venue, publisher, citation count, DOI, open-access status and research topics. Filter by publication year, work type and open access, and collect thousands of works per search term. No account, no API key. Ideal for literature reviews, R&D scouting, bibliometrics and building research datasets.

Features

• 🔎 Multi-term search — pass any number of searchTerms (matched against title, abstract and fulltext); each term runs separately and results are deduped by OpenAlex work ID.
• 📅 Year filtering — bound results with fromYear and toYear to focus on a publication window (0 = no bound).
• 🔓 Open-access filter — flip openAccessOnly to keep only OA works, and get oaStatus plus a direct oaUrl for each.
• 🗂️ Work-type filter — narrow to article, preprint, review, book-chapter, dataset and more via workType.
• 📝 Reconstructed abstracts — toggle includeAbstract to rebuild readable abstract text from OpenAlex's inverted index.
• 👥 Rich authorship — every author with their affiliated institutions, plus a ready-to-read authorsList string and authorCount.
• 📈 Bibliometrics built in — citation counts, referenced-works counts, venue, publisher and research topics on every record; scale to maxResultsPerSearch up to 10,000.

What you get

Each dataset row is one scholarly work:

{
  "searchTerm": "machine learning",
  "title": "Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition",
  "doi": "https://doi.org/10.1109/cvpr.2016.90",
  "openAlexId": "https://openalex.org/W2194775991",
  "publicationYear": 2016,
  "publicationDate": "2016-06-01",
  "type": "article",
  "language": "en",
  "citedByCount": 210453,
  "referencedWorksCount": 38,
  "authorsList": "Kaiming He; Xiangyu Zhang; Shaoqing Ren; Jian Sun",
  "authors": [
    { "name": "Kaiming He", "institutions": ["Microsoft Research"] }
  ],
  "authorCount": 4,
  "venue": "IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition",
  "publisher": "IEEE",
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "oaStatus": "green",
  "oaUrl": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.03385",
  "topics": ["Deep Learning", "Image Classification"],
  "url": "https://doi.org/10.1109/cvpr.2016.90",
  "abstract": "Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train..."
}

Output schema

Input

{
  "searchTerms": ["crispr gene editing", "large language models"],
  "fromYear": 2020,
  "toYear": 0,
  "openAccessOnly": false,
  "workType": "article",
  "maxResultsPerSearch": 50,
  "includeAbstract": true
}

Use cases

• Run a systematic literature review and export a structured, citation-ranked corpus.
• Map the most-cited authors, institutions and venues for a research topic.
• Track emerging preprints and open-access work in a fast-moving field.
• Build training or RAG datasets of abstracts and metadata for research tooling.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: you're billed a small amount per run and per item scraped — you only pay for what you get. See the Pricing tab for current rates.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. This Actor uses the public OpenAlex API with no account, login or API key required — just enter your search terms and run.

How many papers can I scrape per run? Up to 10,000 works per search term via maxResultsPerSearch, and you can pass multiple searchTerms in one run, so a single run can collect tens of thousands of works (deduped by OpenAlex work ID).

Is scraping OpenAlex legal? Yes. OpenAlex is a fully open catalog of scholarly metadata, and this Actor reads only those openly available records through the official API and returns them as-is.

What format is the output? Structured JSON — one row per scholarly work — exportable as JSON, CSV or Excel. Each record includes title, reconstructed abstract, authors with institutions, venue, publisher, citation count, DOI and open-access status.

Can I filter by year or open access? Yes. Bound results with fromYear/toYear, keep only open-access works with openAccessOnly, and narrow to a specific workType such as article, preprint, review or dataset.

Can I integrate this with other tools? The OpenAlex Scholarly Works Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app thanks to integrations on the Apify platform. It works with Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub, Google Drive and many more, plus the Apify API, JavaScript/Python clients and MCP. Or use webhooks to trigger an action whenever a run finishes.

Building a bibliometrics or literature dataset? These other hipersoft scrapers work well alongside this one:

• Crossref Scraper — DOIs, citation counts and metadata from 150M+ registered works
• Semantic Scholar Scraper — papers with citation and influential-citation metrics
• arXiv Papers Scraper — preprints with full abstracts and PDF links
• PubMed Scraper — biomedical literature, abstracts and MeSH terms

Notes

This Actor uses the public OpenAlex API and returns that catalog's own metadata as-is, over openly available records with no login required. It is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by OpenAlex or OurResearch.

You pay only for what the run returns. Set a maximum cost per run and it stops cleanly at that limit.