Awards
An award is a single research grant: a specific pot of money a funder gave for a project, with a title, an amount, a period, and a lead investigator. Awards are the fine-grained link between funders and the works their money produced — where a funder answers “who paid,” an award answers “which grant.” OpenAlex tracks over 17 million awards. An award’s OpenAlex ID looks like G5066037109; fetch one at api.openalex.org/awards/G5066037109.
How it’s made
Where grant data comes from
Awards are assembled from grant metadata published by funders and aggregators, tracked in provenance. The big sources are the grant-and-funder fields inside Crossref work records (crossref_work_funders, crossref_work.grants), Europe PMC (europepmc_work_funders), and national grant databases published directly by funders — the NIH RePORTER export (nih_exporter), Japan’s KAKEN, the US NSF award search, the EU’s CORDIS, UK Gateway to Research, and hundreds of others. OpenAlex normalizes these heterogeneous feeds into one award shape.
Matching awards to funders and works
Two links make an award useful, and both are built by matching:
- Award → funder. Each award records the funder that made it in
funder, matched to OpenAlex’s funder list (see Funders). The funder’s own grant ID for the award is kept infunder_award_id. - Award → works. OpenAlex links each award to the works it funded in
funded_outputs, by matching grant mentions in work metadata (or work lists in the funder’s own grant records) to works already in OpenAlex. The reverse view — every work an award funded — is atworks_api_url.
Failure modes
Because both links are matched, they can be incomplete: an award may list no works (funded_outputs_count of 0) even when it funded some, if the grant was never named in a matchable work record; conversely a work may be missing its award. Fields also vary widely by source — a rich nih_exporter award carries amount, dates, scheme, and a lead investigator, while a bare Crossref grant may have little beyond a funder and a grant ID. Amounts arrive in the funder’s own currency and are not converted.
Attributes
This is the canonical dictionary of every attribute on an award object. Awards carry their own shape (they are grant records, not organizations), so most fields are award-specific; the shared id, display_name, created_date, and updated_date are documented once on Common attributes.
id
String. The OpenAlex ID for this award, e.g. https://openalex.org/G5066037109. See Common attributes.
display_name
String. The award’s title, e.g. Genetic analysis of dopaminergic neuron specification in C.elegans. May be null when the source supplied no title. See Common attributes.
description
String. A longer abstract or narrative of the funded project, when the source provides one.
funder
Object. The funder that made this award, dehydrated: id, display_name, and doi (the Funder DOI). Filter on funder.id, funder.ror, or funder.doi.
funder_award_id
String. The funder’s own identifier for this grant (e.g. an NIH grant number like 2r01ns050266-06). This is what appears in a work’s grant metadata.
funder_scheme
String. The funder’s grant scheme or mechanism (e.g. R01, F32 for the NIH), when supplied.
funding_type
String. The kind of funding (e.g. research, fellowship), when supplied. Filterable and groupable.
amount
Float. The monetary amount of the award, in currency. May be null. Filterable and sortable but not groupable.
currency
String. The ISO 4217 currency code for amount (e.g. USD). Not converted across awards.
start_date
String. The award’s start date, as an ISO 8601 date.
start_year
Integer. The year the award started. Filterable, sortable, and groupable.
end_date
String. The award’s end date, as an ISO 8601 date; may be null for open-ended or unreported awards.
end_year
Integer. The year the award ended. Filterable, sortable, and groupable.
funded_outputs
List. OpenAlex IDs of the works this award funded (see How we build it). Can be empty even for a real grant.
funded_outputs_count
Integer. The number of funded_outputs. Filterable and sortable.
doi
String. A DOI for the grant itself, when the source assigns one (common for CORDIS awards); often null.
landing_page_url
String. A URL to the funder’s public page for this grant (e.g. a NIH RePORTER project page).
provenance
String. The data source this award was built from (e.g. nih_exporter, crossref_work_funders, cordis). See Where grant data comes from. Filterable and groupable.
lead_investigator
Object. The award’s principal investigator: given_name, family_name, orcid, role_start, and an affiliation (name, country, ids). Fields may be null. Filter on the dotted subfields (lead_investigator.orcid, lead_investigator.family_name, lead_investigator.affiliation.country, and so on).
co_lead_investigator
Object. A co-principal investigator, in the same shape as lead_investigator, or null.
investigators
List. Additional investigators on the award, each in the lead_investigator shape, or null.
institution_awarded
List. The institutions that received the award, each dehydrated (id, display_name, ror, country_code, type, lineage). Filter on the dotted subfields (institution_awarded.id, institution_awarded.ror, institution_awarded.country_code, institution_awarded.type).
primary_topic
Object. The top-ranked topic inferred for the award, with its subfield, field, and domain — the same shape as a work’s. May be null.
topics
List. Up to three ranked topics for the award, each with a score and its subfield/field/domain. May be null.
works_api_url
String. A ready-made API URL listing every work this award funded (i.e. works?filter=awards.id:<id>). A convenience link, not a stored value.
created_date
String. The date this award was added to OpenAlex (YYYY-MM-DD). See Common attributes.
updated_date
String. The ISO 8601 UTC timestamp of the last change to this award object. See Common attributes.
In the API
The Awards endpoint is at api.openalex.org/awards. Fetch a single award by ID — /awards/G5066037109 — or a list, and filter, search, sort, group, and page over the fields above. To find every award from a given funder, filter on funder.id; to find the works an award funded, filter works on awards.id. For the full list of endpoints see the endpoints index.