Works

A work is any scholarly document: a journal article, conference paper, book or book chapter, dataset, dissertation, preprint, and more. Works are the core of OpenAlex — over 320 million of them, with tens of thousands added every day — and every other entity (authors, sources, institutions, topics, funders) connects to the works it produced, published, or funded.

This page covers what a work is and how one comes to exist in OpenAlex. The rest of this zone covers the specifics: work types, versions, citations, and counts by year.

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 How OpenAlex works 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.

The work record

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. Every field on a work is documented in the Works API reference.