Quickstart
Let’s get real data out of OpenAlex in about five minutes. We’ll answer the same question three ways, moving up the power curve each time: on the website, through the API, and by handing the whole job to an AI agent.
Our question: what are the most-cited recent papers about microplastics?
1. On the website
- Go to openalex.org and search microplastics.
- Use the filters to narrow to works published since 2024.
- Sort by citation count, and export your results to CSV when you’re happy with them.
No code, no account, no charge. For most one-off questions, this is all you need — see exporting results for the details.
2. Through the API
Everything the website can do, the API can do programmatically. The same question is one URL:
https://api.openalex.org/works?search=microplastics&filter=from_publication_date:2024-01-01&sort=cited_by_count:descPaste that into your browser or curl it — you’ll get JSON back, no key required.
To go past casual use, you’ll want a free API key: it raises your daily request budget by 10×. Sign up at openalex.org, copy your key from Settings → API key, and send it with each request:
curl "https://api.openalex.org/works?search=microplastics" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"From here, see the API quickstart and authentication pages.
3. Or just ask your agent
Here’s the thing about steps 1 and 2: we didn’t really need to learn the API — or use the website — at all. We could have just asked an AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or whatever you use) and let it do the whole job:
Using the OpenAlex API, find the 25 most-cited papers about microplastics published since 2024 and save them as a CSV with title, year, citations, and DOI.
That’s it. Agents already know OpenAlex, and anything they’re unsure of they can find right here at help.openalex.org — the site is optimized for AI use.
Give your agent your API key. Agents make a lot of requests, so the keyless budget runs out fast; at any reasonable scale your agent should use your free key. Just paste it into the chat and your agent will take it from there. (If a key ever leaks, no big deal: rotate it in Settings → API key, which invalidates the old one instantly.)
It’s very unusual for agents to hallucinate results here, since the API is so well-structured — but for consequential queries, it’s a good idea to check against the website yourself.