Continents

A continent is one of the major geographic regions of the world — Africa, Asia, Europe, and so on. Continents are a vocabulary: a fixed, crisply-existing list that OpenAlex simply attaches a handle to. Each country belongs to exactly one continent, so a continent is really a convenient roll-up of countries — handy for filtering works by geographic region or comparing research output across parts of the world. Continents are used on the same entities as countries: institutions, authors, and works. A continent’s OpenAlex ID looks like https://openalex.org/continents/Q15; fetch one at api.openalex.org/continents/Q15.

How we build it

Continents are the standard seven-continent model, with each country assigned to one via its ISO 3166 code. OpenAlex keys each continent by its Wikidata QID (e.g. Q15 for Africa) and adds live scholarly counts on top.

Values

There are seven continents — the complete list:

Fields

The top-level fields on a continent object. Fields shared with other entities (id, ids, display_name, created_date, updated_date) are documented once on Common fields.

id

String. The OpenAlex ID for this continent, e.g. https://openalex.org/continents/Q15. The final path segment is the Wikidata QID. See Common fields.

ids

Object. External identifiers for the continent: openalex and wikidata.

display_name

String. The continent’s English name, e.g. Africa. See Common fields.

description

String. A short one-line description (typically just “continent”).

display_name_alternatives

List. Other names for the continent, when any exist.

countries

List. The countries on this continent, each a dehydrated { id, display_name }.

created_date

String. When the continent record was added to OpenAlex (YYYY-MM-DD). See Common fields.

updated_date

String. When the continent record last changed. See Common fields.

In the API

The Continents endpoint is at api.openalex.org/continents. Fetch one by ID — /continents/Q15 — or list all seven.

To use continents as a filter on other entities, filter works by author continent with filter=authorships.institutions.continent:africa (the lowercased continent name is accepted), and group any list by continent with group_by=authorships.institutions.continent. See Filtering for the full syntax and the endpoints index for every endpoint. Related: countries.