Works Overview
A work is any scholarly document: a journal article, conference paper, book or book chapter, dataset, dissertation, preprint, and more. There are over 320 million works in OpenAlex, with tens of thousands added every day. A work’s OpenAlex ID looks like W2741809807; fetch one at api.openalex.org/works/W2741809807.
Works are the central entity in OpenAlex — everything connects to them. Authors write works, sources publish them, institutions get credit for them, topics describe them, and funders pay for them. Works also carry by far the most information of any entity: all twenty-ish entity types are first-class citizens, but works are the firstest class.
How it’s made
Where works come from
OpenAlex aggregates and builds on many open data sources. The catalog was seeded by the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) — Microsoft Research’s effort to catalog the scholarly literature — whose final open dataset OpenAlex adopted when the project was discontinued in 2021. The other primary source is Crossref, the open DOI-registration agency. Alongside those, works are drawn from DataCite, PubMed, HAL, institutional and subject repositories, and more; see the Overview for the full ingest picture.
From record to work
Information about a scholarly document arrives as a record. A record might be an item of Crossref metadata, an entry from a repository like arXiv or PubMed, or publicly available information from the web.
The first task with any new record is to decide whether the work it describes is already in OpenAlex:
- The record matches an existing work. Using the record’s DOI or other metadata-matching techniques, OpenAlex links it to a work it already knows about and uses the record to enrich that work.
- The record is new. If nothing matches, the record represents a work OpenAlex hasn’t seen. OpenAlex then either creates a new work from it, or sets it aside to enrich a work added later.
Not every record becomes its own work. Which new works get created follows a set of rules — for example, nearly all records from Crossref and a few other trusted sources (PubMed, arXiv, and several repositories) are eligible to become new works, while records from noisier sources are held to a higher bar. Once a work exists, OpenAlex tracks its own metadata — title, abstract (and often full text), publication date, type — and the connections that make it useful at scale: authors, institutional affiliations, the source it appeared in, topics, funders, and citations.
How works cite each other — references, citation counts, and FWCI — has its own page: Citations. How OpenAlex decides whether a work is free to read: Open access.
In the API
The Works endpoint is at api.openalex.org/works. Fetch a single work by ID — /works/W2741809807 — or a list, and filter, search, sort, group, and page over the attributes documented on the Attributes page. For the full list of endpoints see the endpoints index.