Page through Results

Basic paging

Use page and per_page to navigate results:

There is no fixed cap on page itself — the limit is on how deep you can go: page × per_page must not exceed 10,000 (see the warning below).

# Page 2 with 100 results per page
https://api.openalex.org/works?page=2&per_page=100

Warning: Basic paging limit: You can only access the first 10,000 results (page * per_page must not exceed 10,000). Use cursor paging for more.

Note: The API currently accepts per_page=200 as legacy behavior, but this is deprecated and will be removed — don’t rely on it. 100 is the supported maximum.

Cursor paging

Cursor paging lets you access any number of results:

Step 1: Start with cursor=*

https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=publication_year:2020&per_page=100&cursor=*

Step 2: Get the next_cursor from the response:

{
  "meta": {
    "count": 8695857,
    "per_page": 100,
    "next_cursor": "IlsxNjA5MzcyODAwMDAwLCAnaHR0cHM..."
  },
  "results": ["..."]
}

Step 3: Use next_cursor for the next page:

https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=publication_year:2020&per_page=100&cursor=IlsxNjA5MzcyODAwMDAwLCAnaHR0cHM...

Repeat until next_cursor is null and results is empty.

Note: Cursor paging also works with group_by. To page through more than 200 groups, follow next_cursor exactly as shown above. Basic page-based paging (page=2, …) is not supported for grouped results — you must use cursor paging. See Group.

Warning: Don’t use cursor paging to download the entire dataset.

• It takes days to page through /works or /authors
• It puts heavy load on our servers

Instead, use the OpenAlex snapshot for bulk downloads. It’s free, fast, and each record has the same shape as an API response (with a few known differences).

Jupyter notebook

See this community notebook for executable paging examples.