Tag Aboutness

The /text endpoint lets you tag free text with OpenAlex’s “aboutness” assignments: topics (with their subfield, field, and domain) and keywords. Give it the title and abstract of an unpublished paper, a grant proposal, or any other text, and you get back the same labels OpenAlex assigns to indexed works.

Request format

Send a title and optional abstract via GET or POST:

GET https://api.openalex.org/text/topics?title=type%201%20diabetes%20research%20for%20children

For a POST, send the same two fields as JSON.

Available endpoints

Note: Keyword tagging is temporarily unavailable while OpenAlex rebuilds its keyword vocabulary and tagger. Until then keywords is an empty list and meta.note says so. Topics are unaffected. Keywords will return when the new tagger is live.

Example response

GET https://api.openalex.org/text?title=type%201%20diabetes%20research%20for%20children

{
  "meta": {
    "keywords_count": 0,
    "topics_count": 3,
    "note": "Keyword tagging is temporarily unavailable, so keywords is empty. Topics are unaffected. Keywords are being rebuilt."
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "primary_topic": {
    "id": "https://openalex.org/T10560",
    "display_name": "Diabetes Management and Research",
    "score": 0.995,
    "subfield": {
      "id": "https://openalex.org/subfields/2712",
      "display_name": "Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism"
    },
    "field": {
      "id": "https://openalex.org/fields/27",
      "display_name": "Medicine"
    },
    "domain": {
      "id": "https://openalex.org/domains/4",
      "display_name": "Health Sciences"
    }
  },
  "topics": [
    { "...": "the same three topics, best first" }
  ]
}

Scores are the classifier’s confidence, from 0 to 1. /text/topics and /text/keywords return the same objects with a single count in meta.

If the topic classifier cannot place a text, topics is empty. This happens with short or non-descriptive titles, such as a bare project or institution name. Sending an abstract alongside the title gives the classifier much more to work with.

Limits