Funders
A funder is an organization that funds research — a government agency, foundation, or charity. OpenAlex tracks about 45,000 funders, and each connects to the works it funded and to the specific awards (grants) that funded them. A funder’s OpenAlex ID looks like F4320332161; fetch one at api.openalex.org/funders/F4320332161 (the US National Institutes of Health).
How it’s made
Where funders come from
Funders are native entities: OpenAlex decides which real-world organizations count as distinct funders and mints an ID for each. The funder list is grounded in the Crossref Open Funder Registry — Crossref’s canonical list of research funders, each with a stable Funder DOI (e.g. 10.13039/100000002 for the NIH) — and enriched with names, homepages, logos, and country from Wikidata and ROR. Those registries are also where the external IDs in ids come from: the Crossref funder ID and DOI, plus ROR and Wikidata IDs where they exist.
How funders connect to works
OpenAlex doesn’t observe funding directly; it reads it off the works. When a work’s metadata (from Crossref, a funder’s own grant records, or other sources) names a funder or a grant, OpenAlex matches that mention to a funder in this list and to the specific award if one is identified. Roll-up counts live on the funder: works_count is how many works name this funder, awards_count is how many distinct grants OpenAlex has recorded for it, and cited_by_count sums citations across those works. See Awards for how individual grants are built.
Roles
Like publishers, a funder can be the same real-world organization as an institution or a publisher — a university that both funds and hosts research, for instance. roles links those alter egos together.
Failure modes
Because funders are inferred and matched, they can be wrong: a funder mentioned only by a noisy free-text string may not match (so a work that was funded shows no funder), two records for one funder may not yet be merged, or a small funder may be absent from the source registries and so missing here. These are curatable.
Attributes
This is the canonical dictionary of every attribute on a funder object. Attributes shared with other entities (id, ids, display_name, works_count, cited_by_count, summary_stats, counts_by_year, created_date, updated_date) are documented once on Common attributes; funder-specific notes are below.
id
String. The OpenAlex ID for this funder, e.g. https://openalex.org/F4320332161. See Common attributes.
ids
Object. All known external identifiers for this funder, as URIs or bare values. Funder keys: openalex, ror, wikidata, crossref (the Crossref funder registry ID), and doi (the Funder DOI). See Common attributes.
display_name
String. The funder’s name, e.g. National Institutes of Health. See Common attributes. Filterable and searchable; not available as a group_by.
alternate_titles
List. Other names the funder is known by, including acronyms (NIH) and names in other languages.
description
String. A short description of the funder, usually pulled from Wikidata (e.g. “US government medical research agency”).
country_code
String. The ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code of the country the funder is based in. Unlike a publisher’s list, a funder has a single home country.
is_global_south
Boolean. Whether the funder is based in the Global South. Filterable and groupable — handy for equity analyses.
awards_count
Integer. The number of distinct awards (grants) OpenAlex has recorded for this funder.
homepage_url
String. The URL of the funder’s homepage.
image_url
String. A URL to the funder’s logo or a representative image (usually from Wikimedia Commons).
image_thumbnail_url
String. Like image_url, but scaled down for a thumbnail (a width parameter is appended).
works_count
Integer. The number of works that name this funder. See Common attributes.
cited_by_count
Integer. Total citations received across all works this funder funded. See Common attributes.
summary_stats
Object. Precomputed bibliometric indicators (2yr_mean_citedness, h_index, i10_index) over the funder’s works. See Common attributes.
counts_by_year
List. Works and citations per year for roughly the last ten years; funder rollups also carry oa_works_count per year. See Common attributes.
roles
List. The other OpenAlex entities that are the same real-world organization — each a { role, id, works_count } object where role is one of funder, institution, or publisher. See Roles. Filter on roles.id.
created_date
String. The date this funder was added to OpenAlex (YYYY-MM-DD). See Common attributes.
updated_date
String. The ISO 8601 UTC timestamp of the last change to this funder object. See Common attributes.
In the API
The Funders endpoint is at api.openalex.org/funders. Fetch a single funder by ID — /funders/F4320332161 — or a list, and filter, search, sort, group, and page over the fields above. To find the works a funder funded, filter works on funders.id; for the individual grants, see awards. For the full list of endpoints see the endpoints index.