Common fields
A handful of fields appear on nearly every OpenAlex entity. They mean the same thing everywhere, so they’re documented here once; each entity’s own field dictionary links back to this page rather than repeating them.
Identity
id
String. The canonical OpenAlex ID for this entity, as a URL, e.g. https://openalex.org/A5023888391. Stable; if the entity is later merged into another, this ID permanently redirects to the survivor.
ids
Object. All known identifiers for this entity, expressed as URIs where possible, keyed by namespace — always openalex, plus whichever external IDs apply to the entity type (doi, orcid, ror, issn_l, wikidata, mag, …). Keys with no known value are omitted.
display_name
String. The entity’s name — a work’s title, an author’s name, a source’s title, an institution’s name. Every entity has one.
Scale & influence
works_count
Integer. How many works are associated with this entity — authored by an author, published in a source, affiliated with an institution, tagged with a topic, and so on. For works themselves this field is absent.
cited_by_count
Integer. The total number of citations this entity has received — summed across all of its works for non-work entities. Recomputed as the graph updates, so it drifts upward over time.
summary_stats
Object. A few precomputed bibliometric indicators for the entity:
2yr_mean_citedness— the journal impact factor-style 2-year mean citedness.h_index— the h-index.i10_index— the number of works with at least 10 citations.
These are convenience metrics; for anything rigorous, compute over the underlying works. Not available on works.
counts_by_year
List. Per-year rollup of the entity’s activity for roughly the last ten years, each element { year, works_count, cited_by_count } (author/source/etc. objects also carry oa_works_count). Handy for sparklines and trend lines. The array’s sort direction is not consistent across entity types — always sort by year yourself before slicing the most-recent N.
Provenance timestamps
created_date
String. The date this entity was first added to OpenAlex, as an YYYY-MM-DD date.
updated_date
String. The datetime this entity was last changed in any way (an ISO 8601 datetime). Note this reflects any update, including routine recomputation of citation counts — not only meaningful metadata changes.
In the API
These fields are selectable, and most are filterable and sortable, on every entity endpoint — see Selecting fields and Filtering. The exact operations each field supports are listed in that entity’s field dictionary.