Quickstart

Let’s get real data out of OpenAlex in about five minutes. We’ll answer the same question three ways, moving up the power curve each time: on the website, through the API, and by handing the whole job to an AI agent.

Our question: what are the most-cited recent papers about microplastics?

1. On the website

1. Go to openalex.org and search microplastics.
2. Use the filters to narrow to works published since 2024.
3. Sort by citation count, and export your results to CSV when you’re happy with them.

No code, no account, no charge. For most one-off questions, this is all you need — see exporting results for the details.

2. Through the API

Everything the website can do, the API can do programmatically. The same question is one URL:

https://api.openalex.org/works?search=microplastics&filter=from_publication_date:2024-01-01&sort=cited_by_count:desc

Paste that into your browser or curl it — you’ll get JSON back, no key required. From there it’s all small, composable moves: change the sort, stack on another filter, or turn any query into counts with group_by:

https://api.openalex.org/works?search=microplastics&group_by=publication_year

One habit worth building early: don’t filter by names — look up the entity’s ID first, since names like “Smith” or “MIT” are ambiguous.

To go past casual use, you’ll want a free API key: it raises your daily budget 10×. Sign up at openalex.org, copy your key from Settings → API key, and send it with each request — as an api_key query parameter, or a bearer token (both work):

curl "https://api.openalex.org/works?search=microplastics&api_key=YOUR_API_KEY"

From here, see the API Overview, Authentication, and the Querying reference.

3. Or just ask your agent

Here’s the thing about steps 1 and 2: we didn’t really need to learn the API — or use the website — at all. We could have just asked an AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or whatever you use) and let it do the whole job:

Using the OpenAlex API, find the 25 most-cited papers about microplastics published since 2024 and save them as a CSV with title, year, citations, and DOI.

That’s it. Agents already know OpenAlex, and anything they’re unsure of they can find right here at help.openalex.org — the site is optimized for AI use.

Give your agent your API key. Agents make a lot of requests, so the keyless budget runs out fast; at any reasonable scale your agent should use your free key. Just paste it into the chat and your agent will take it from there. (If a key ever leaks, no big deal: rotate it in Settings → API key, which invalidates the old one instantly.)

It’s very unusual for agents to hallucinate results here, since the API is so well-structured — but for consequential queries, it’s a good idea to check against the website yourself.

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