Work fields

This is the canonical dictionary of every field on a work object: what each field means, its type, and how it’s structured. When you fetch a single work or a list of works, this is what comes back.

For the mechanics of the Works endpoint — which fields you can filter, sort, and group on, and the query syntax — see the Works API reference.

Identity & identifiers

id

String. The OpenAlex ID for this work, e.g. https://openalex.org/W2741809807.

ids

Object. All known external identifiers for this work, expressed as URIs where possible. Keys for unknown IDs are omitted. Possible keys: openalex, doi, mag (Microsoft Academic Graph integer ID), pmid (PubMed), pmcid (PubMed Central).

doi

String. The work’s DOI — the canonical external ID for works. A work occasionally has more than one DOI (for example a preprint DOI and a published DOI); this field always holds the single DOI of the published version.

display_name

String. The work’s title. Identical to title; every OpenAlex entity carries a display_name, so works do too.

title

String. The title of the work. Identical to display_name.

type

String. The work’s type (e.g. article, preprint, dataset, paratext). Every work has exactly one. See Work types for the full vocabulary and how the type is assigned.

language

String. The language of the work’s metadata (title/abstract), in ISO 639-1 format, auto-detected with langdetect. This reflects the language of the metadata, not necessarily the full text, and is left unset when there aren’t enough words to guess reliably.

Bibliographic

publication_date

String. The day the work was published, as an ISO 8601 date. Where several dates exist, OpenAlex usually picks the earliest electronic-publication date. Applies to the primary_location version; other locations may be earlier.

publication_year

Integer. The year the work was published.

biblio

Object. Old-style bibliographic pointers, mostly useful in citation contexts. All strings (values like “Spring” or “Inside cover” turn up): volume, issue, first_page, last_page.

abstract_inverted_index

Object. The abstract as an inverted index — each word mapped to its positions in the text. OpenAlex does not ship plaintext abstracts for legal reasons; reconstruct the abstract from the index. Newer works are more likely to have one (over 60% of 2022 works vs. ~45% of pre-2000 works).

abstract_inverted_index: { "Despite": [0], "growing": [1], "interest": [2], "in": [3, 57, 73] }

Authorship & affiliations

authorships

List. Authorship objects, each pairing an author with their institution(s) and role on the work. Capped at the first 100 authors for performance.

corresponding_author_ids

List. OpenAlex IDs of authors whose authorship has is_corresponding: true.

corresponding_institution_ids

List. OpenAlex IDs of institutions attached to a corresponding author’s authorship.

countries_distinct_count

Integer. Number of distinct author country codes across the work’s authorships.

institutions_distinct_count

Integer. Number of distinct institutions across the work’s authorships.

Sources & locations

A location is a place where the work can be found — a publisher landing page, a repository copy, and so on. See the location object for the full shape (is_oa, landing_page_url, pdf_url, source, license, version).

primary_location

Object. The location holding the best (closest to the version of record) copy — for a journal article, the published full text at the publisher’s DOI URL.

locations

List. Every unique place this work lives, each a location object.

locations_count

Integer. The number of locations.

best_oa_location

Object. The best openly available location, or null if none. “Best” is scored by: must be OA; publisher beats repository; publishedVersion beats acceptedVersion beats submittedVersion; a direct PDF link beats none; and major repositories (PubMed Central, arXiv) rank above others. See Versions.

Open access

open_access

Object. The work’s access status, an OpenAccess object with these fields:

• is_oa (Boolean) — true if a free-to-read full text exists somewhere (OpenAlex uses a broad definition: readable without paying or logging in).
• oa_status (String) — one of diamond (fully-OA journal, no APC), gold (fully-OA journal), green (toll-access publisher page but a free repository copy exists), hybrid (free under an open license in a toll-access journal), bronze (free to read on the publisher page but no identifiable license), or closed. The bronze-vs-gold distinction depends on the journal’s openness — see Journal quality & OA status.
• oa_url (String) — the best OA URL (closest to the version of record); may be a PDF or a landing page.
• any_repository_has_fulltext (Boolean) — true if any location is both OA and hosted by a repository. Lets you track “shadowed green” OA that oa_status hides once a publisher-hosted copy exists.

apc_list

Object. The work’s list-price article processing charge as advertised by the journal (value, currency, value_usd, provenance — currently only doaj). This is the listed price, not necessarily what was paid. apc_list.value of zero indicates a diamond-OA journal.

apc_paid

Object. OpenAlex’s best estimate of the APC actually paid (value, currency, value_usd, provenance). Prefers article-level data from OpenAPC (provenance: "openapc"); when unavailable, falls back to the list price.

Note: apc_paid is an estimate — often just the list price. For article-level data only, filter with apc_paid.provenance:openapc.

Classification

For how these are produced, see Aboutness.

primary_topic

Object. The top-ranked topic for the work, with its subfield, field, and domain. Same as the first entry in topics.

topics

List. Up to three ranked topics for the work, each with a score and its subfield/field/domain.

keywords

List. Short phrases derived from the work’s topics (keywords), each with a similarity score to the title and abstract. Only keywords above a score threshold are included.

concepts

List. Legacy concept tags with a score. Concepts are a superseded classification retained for continuity; topics are the current primary classification. Ancestors of assigned concepts are also included, so you may see low or zero scores.

sustainable_development_goals

List. The work’s relevance to the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, tagged by a machine-learning classifier, each with a predicted-probability score. All goals scoring above 0.4 are shown.

mesh

List. MeSH tag objects. Present only for works sourced from PubMed; an empty list otherwise.

Citations & impact

cited_by_count

Integer. The number of works that cite this work. See Citations.

counts_by_year

List. cited_by_count for each of the last ten years, binned by year. Years with zero citations are omitted; citations older than ten years are excluded. See Counts by year.

cited_by_percentile_year

Object. The percentile rank of this work’s citation count against other works from the same year, as a min/max range.

fwci

Float. The Field-Weighted Citation Impact: citations received divided by citations expected for works of the same type, year, and subfield.

citation_normalized_percentile

Object. The same information as fwci expressed as a percentile (value, is_in_top_1_percent, is_in_top_10_percent).

referenced_works

List. OpenAlex IDs of the works this work cites (this work ➞ others). See Citations.

referenced_works_count

Integer. The length of referenced_works.

related_works

List. OpenAlex IDs of algorithmically related works — recent papers sharing the most topics with this one.

Funding

funders

List. Dehydrated funder objects for this work. Replaces the removed grants property.

awards

List. Award/grant objects (id, display_name, funder_award_id, funder_id, funder_display_name, doi) linking the work to specific grants. Replaces the removed grants property.

Full-text content

has_content

Object. Whether downloadable full text exists: pdf (Boolean) and grobid_xml (Boolean, TEI XML). About 60 million works have has_content.pdf: true. See Full-text PDFs.

content_url

String. A URL for downloading full-text content, present only when has_content indicates a PDF or TEI XML is available. Append .pdf or .grobid-xml and your API key to fetch a format.

Note: content_url is available only through the API, not in the snapshot.

Flags

is_retracted

Boolean. True if the work is known to be retracted, per the Retraction Watch database.

is_paratext (deprecated)

Boolean. True if the work is paratext (covers, tables of contents, mastheads, and similar). Now derived directly from type — it is true exactly when type is paratext. Filter with type:paratext instead.

is_xpac

Boolean. True if the work is part of the XPAC (Expansion Pack) dataset — the 190M+ works added in the Walden update, primarily datasets and single-repository records. Data quality on XPAC works is lower but improving. XPAC works are excluded from API results by default; include them with include_xpac=true.

Indexing

indexed_in

List. The sources this work is indexed in. Possible values: arxiv, crossref, doaj, pubmed.

Housekeeping dates

created_date

String. The ISO 8601 date the work was added to OpenAlex.

updated_date

String. The ISO 8601 timestamp (UTC) of the last change to anything in the work object — including count increases.

Deprecated fields

• host_venue and alternate_host_venues — removed; use primary_location and locations. Filtering or grouping on them errors.
• grants — removed; use funders and awards.
• concepts — superseded by topics (still present; see above).