Help
Plain answers to common questions — accounts, author profiles, fixing errors, exports.
- About usInspired by the Library of Alexandria, we catalog 474 million scholarly works, linking them to authors, institutions, funders, and more—all fully open.
- Conferences and other eventsHere's a list of the conferences we expect to attend in 2025 (we will add more as we confirm participation). Come say hi if you'll also be there!
- Export results from the OpenAlex websiteAbove any Works result set, you will see an export button !(https://help.openalex.org/hc/articleattachments/24829724230167) that you can click to download a file with OpenAlex's…
- Fix errors in OpenAlexThere are lots of ways that errors can get into OpenAlex. There may be an error in one of our upstream data sources (like Crossref or a repository). It's also possible an error…
- How can I cite OpenAlex?This is really important for us because it allows us to understand how the community is using OpenAlex and helps us demonstrate impact to our funders, which in turn helps keep O…
- How can I correct institutional affiliations for a work?If you see that an institution is incorrectly attributed to a work, you can using the works-magnet tool(https://works-magnet.esr.gouv.fr/) to fix that affiliation. We have made…
- How can I correct the Open Access status of journals in Unpaywall?If you've found a journal in Unpaywall whose Open Access status is incorrect, you can quickly make submit corrections using our Journal Curation page(https://openalex.org/curate…
- How can I fix errors in an OpenAlex author profile?Claim your OpenAlex author profile to fix errors: add or remove works, correct your name, and merge duplicate profiles.
- How can I fix errors in an OpenAlex Source profile?Disambiguating text about publication venues into the correct Sources is foundational to most bibliometric and research intelligence use case. Our approach is to use the informa…
- How can I get my journal indexed in OpenAlex?OpenAlex doesn't index journals-- we index works (publications, datasets, etc). We index works which have records in at least one of our main, trusted repositories: Crossref, Da…
- How can I get my repository indexed in OpenAlex?Currently, OpenAlex doesn't mint new works for institutional repositories. Instead, when we get information about a new publication we look through institutional repositories to…
- How do I find a publication's OpenAlex work ID?The OpenAlex Work ID is a unique identifier that refers to an OpenAlex work (e.g., publication, dataset, thesis, etc). All work IDs begin with a W and are followed by numbers, l…
- How do I find my OpenAlex author ID?OpenAlex author IDs are the unique identifier we use for author profiles. They start with "A" and are followed by a unique number. For instance, the author profile ID for our CO…
- How do I find the most cited publications?In the OpenAlex user interface and API, you can sort any works search by the number of citations received. In fact, the default sort is descending citation count, so you'll get…
- How do I find the OpenAlex Source ID?The OpenAlex Source ID is a unique identifier that refers to venue hosting the work. This includes journals, conferences, repositories, ebook platform, book series, and other. T…
- How do I find the Publisher ID for a journal's host organization?In OpenAlex, publishers are identified with a unique Publisher ID, starting with a P (e.g., P4310320595). You can find this number a few different ways in OpenAlex.
- How do I import OpenAlex data into VOSviewer?VOSviewer(https://www.vosviewer.com/) is an open source software tool that constructs and visualizes bibliometric network data. It's a powerful tool trusted by bibliometricians…
- How do I limit my results to only the top 100 cited publications?The easiest way to do this in the user interface is to add a filter to your search that specifies a threshold of number of citations needed to be included in the search and matc…
- How long does it take for you to respond to support tickets?We check the help desk daily. We read every ticket that comes in, but unfortunately don't have the capacity to respond to every ticket. For context, our team is 6 people and we…
- I think my institution is missing works in OpenAlex. What can I do?We match works to institutions algorithmically by using author affiliation text in the work's record against institutional records in ROR. The most common errors we find are when:
- Is there a limit to the length of queries in OpenAlex?Queries in OpenAlex are currently limited to URLs with a total length of 2,048 characters. We're working on a new way of querying the database that is not limited by URL length…
- Office HoursWe have regular office hours on Zoom: alternating between Wednesday at 12pm Eastern and Thursday at 9am Eastern. These are 1-hour informal drop-in/drop-off sessions to have conv…
- Omit retracted works from my analysisYou may want to remove from your analysis all works that have been retracted.
- OpenAlex in the NewsJanuary 2025. Can the World’s Research Ecosystem be Openly Indexed? | Katina Magazine(https://katinamagazine.org/content/article/resource-reviews/2024/can-the-worlds-research-ec…
- PricingOpenAlex is free. The website, API, and data snapshot are all available at no charge. The data is licensed as CC0(https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) so it is fr…
- Projects Using OpenAlexWe're excited about the growing number of projects using OpenAlex and think it's important to profile them. This page is new so bear with us as we start adding more projects to…
- User MeetingThe User Conference was a great success! We had a fantastic showing of presentations from around the world on May 30 and May 31, 2024. The video recordings are now available her…
- Webinars30-minute presentations on topics of broad relevance (recorded) followed by 15-minutes of Q&A on the topic. Recordings of previous webinars available at https://www.youtube.com/…
- What are alternate names and how I do change them?The alternate names field for OpenAlex author profiles (display\name\alternatives(https://docs.openalex.org/api-entities/authors/author-objectdisplaynamealternatives)) are the v…
- What's on OpenAlex's Roadmap?We know how important having a development roadmap is to our users and we’re committed to creating one so that you know what we’re working on and where we’re going.
- Where can I find a non-technical explanation of how Open Alex works?A few places that might be helpful:
- Where can I find information about which issue of a journal an article is in?You can find issue-level metadata for an article either by exporting search results from the user interface or in the "biblio" field(https://docs.openalex.org/api-entities/works…
- Why are my open access curation requests getting rejected?Before submitting a correction to https://unpaywall.org/fix(https://unpaywall.org/fix), check the actual article with your own eyes, from a non-university network. Let’s break i…
- Why are only some of my repository records showing up in openalex?OpenAlex mints new records when one of our trusted repositories (Crossref, PubMed, DataCite, HAL, etc) registers a new work. We then look for open access versions of that work i…
- Why are the counts_by_year numbers different than what I see in the user interface?Users often want to know the total number of publications and citations of each entity (e.g., author, institution, source) in a large list of entities. For instance, of all the…
- Why can’t I find the right publisher for a journal in OpenAlex?We link research outputs to their sources (e.g., journals) using metadata available in the output's record (e.g., text describing journal or ISSN number). We then rely on the so…
- Why does the abstract field have text that isn't part of the abstract?We get abstract metadata from diverse sources and sometimes we have to source it from fulltext articles using text mining techniques. Our processes usually do a great job collec…
- Why is the date field wrong and how can I fix it?Date metadata is surprisingly complex. For instance, a paper can have dates for when a journal mints a DOI for it, the date it is accepted, the date it is 'published', and the d…
- Why is this publication labeled as 'closed' when it is clearly Open Access?To determine the Open Access status of a work, we try to find a PDF of other fulltext format of the work on the landing page of the journal and also by looking through instituti…