Awards

An award is a single research grant: a specific pot of money a funder gave for a project, with a title, an amount, a period, and a lead investigator. Awards are the fine-grained link between funders and the works their money produced — where a funder answers “who paid,” an award answers “which grant.” OpenAlex tracks over 17 million awards. An award’s OpenAlex ID looks like G5066037109; fetch one at api.openalex.org/awards/G5066037109.

How we build it

Where grant data comes from

Awards are assembled from grant metadata published by funders and aggregators, tracked in provenance. The big sources are the grant-and-funder fields inside Crossref work records (crossref_work_funders, crossref_work.grants), Europe PMC (europepmc_work_funders), and national grant databases published directly by funders — the NIH RePORTER export (nih_exporter), Japan’s KAKEN, the US NSF award search, the EU’s CORDIS, UK Gateway to Research, and hundreds of others. OpenAlex normalizes these heterogeneous feeds into one award shape.

Matching awards to funders and works

Two links make an award useful, and both are built by matching:

Award → funder. Each award records the funder that made it in funder, matched to OpenAlex’s funder list (see Funders). The funder’s own grant ID for the award is kept in funder_award_id.
Award → works. OpenAlex links each award to the works it funded in funded_outputs, by matching grant mentions in work metadata (or work lists in the funder’s own grant records) to works already in OpenAlex. The reverse view — every work an award funded — is at works_api_url.

Failure modes

Because both links are matched, they can be incomplete: an award may list no works (funded_outputs_count of 0) even when it funded some, if the grant was never named in a matchable work record; conversely a work may be missing its award. Fields also vary widely by source — a rich nih_exporter award carries amount, dates, scheme, and a lead investigator, while a bare Crossref grant may have little beyond a funder and a grant ID. Amounts arrive in the funder’s own currency and are not converted.

Fields

This is the canonical dictionary of every field on an award object. Awards carry their own shape (they are grant records, not organizations), so most fields are award-specific; the shared id, display_name, created_date, and updated_date are documented once on Common fields.

`id`

String. The OpenAlex ID for this award, e.g. https://openalex.org/G5066037109. See Common fields.

`display_name`

String. The award’s title, e.g. Genetic analysis of dopaminergic neuron specification in C.elegans. May be null when the source supplied no title. See Common fields.

`description`

String. A longer abstract or narrative of the funded project, when the source provides one.

`funder`

Object. The funder that made this award, dehydrated: id, display_name, and doi (the Funder DOI). Filter on funder.id, funder.ror, or funder.doi.

`funder_award_id`

String. The funder’s own identifier for this grant (e.g. an NIH grant number like 2r01ns050266-06). This is what appears in a work’s grant metadata.

`funder_scheme`

String. The funder’s grant scheme or mechanism (e.g. R01, F32 for the NIH), when supplied.

`funding_type`

String. The kind of funding (e.g. research, fellowship), when supplied. Filterable and groupable.

`amount`

Float. The monetary amount of the award, in currency. May be null. Filterable and sortable but not groupable.

`currency`

String. The ISO 4217 currency code for amount (e.g. USD). Not converted across awards.

`start_date`

String. The award’s start date, as an ISO 8601 date.

`start_year`

Integer. The year the award started. Filterable, sortable, and groupable.

`end_date`

String. The award’s end date, as an ISO 8601 date; may be null for open-ended or unreported awards.

`end_year`

Integer. The year the award ended. Filterable, sortable, and groupable.

`funded_outputs`

List. OpenAlex IDs of the works this award funded (see How we build it). Can be empty even for a real grant.

`funded_outputs_count`

Integer. The number of funded_outputs. Filterable and sortable.

`doi`

String. A DOI for the grant itself, when the source assigns one (common for CORDIS awards); often null.

`landing_page_url`

String. A URL to the funder’s public page for this grant (e.g. a NIH RePORTER project page).

`provenance`

String. The data source this award was built from (e.g. nih_exporter, crossref_work_funders, cordis). See Where grant data comes from. Filterable and groupable.

`lead_investigator`

Object. The award’s principal investigator: given_name, family_name, orcid, role_start, and an affiliation (name, country, ids). Fields may be null. Filter on the dotted subfields (lead_investigator.orcid, lead_investigator.family_name, lead_investigator.affiliation.country, and so on).

`co_lead_investigator`

Object. A co-principal investigator, in the same shape as lead_investigator, or null.

`investigators`

List. Additional investigators on the award, each in the lead_investigator shape, or null.

`institution_awarded`

List. The institutions that received the award, each dehydrated (id, display_name, ror, country_code, type, lineage). Filter on the dotted subfields (institution_awarded.id, institution_awarded.ror, institution_awarded.country_code, institution_awarded.type).

`primary_topic`

Object. The top-ranked topic inferred for the award, with its subfield, field, and domain — the same shape as a work’s. May be null.

`topics`

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

`works_api_url`

String. A ready-made API URL listing every work this award funded (i.e. works?filter=awards.id:<id>). A convenience link, not a stored value.

`created_date`

String. The date this award was added to OpenAlex (YYYY-MM-DD). See Common fields.

`updated_date`

String. The ISO 8601 UTC timestamp of the last change to this award object. See Common fields.

In the API

The Awards endpoint is at api.openalex.org/awards. Fetch a single award by ID — /awards/G5066037109 — or a list, and filter, search, sort, group, and page over the fields above. To find every award from a given funder, filter on funder.id; to find the works an award funded, filter works on awards.id. For the full list of endpoints see the endpoints index.

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