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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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OpenAlex API: Search 250M+ Research Papers for Free (No API Key)

#api #python #research #tutorial

OpenAlex has 250 million research papers, and their API is completely free with no API key required.

No rate limits for polite use. No authentication. Just curl and go.

This is the most underrated free API I've found.

Quick Test 

curl "https://api.openalex.org/works?search=machine+learning&per_page=3"
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That's it. 250M papers, zero setup.

Python Client 

import requests

def search_papers(query, limit=10):
    url = "https://api.openalex.org/works"
    params = {
        "search": query,
        "per_page": limit,
        "sort": "cited_by_count:desc"
    }
    response = requests.get(url, params=params)
    data = response.json()

    for paper in data["results"]:
        title = paper["title"]
        year = paper.get("publication_year", "?")
        citations = paper.get("cited_by_count", 0)
        doi = paper.get("doi", "no DOI")
        print(f"[{year}] {title}")
        print(f"  Citations: {citations} | DOI: {doi}")
        print()

search_papers("transformer neural network", limit=5)
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What You Can Search

Endpoint What it returns Example
/works Research papers ?search=CRISPR
/authors Researchers ?search=Hinton
/institutions Universities, labs ?search=MIT
/concepts Research topics ?search=deep+learning
/venues Journals, conferences ?search=Nature

Advanced Filtering 

# Papers from 2024+ with 100+ citations about AI
params = {
    "filter": "publication_year:>2023,cited_by_count:>100",
    "search": "artificial intelligence",
    "sort": "cited_by_count:desc",
    "per_page": 25
}
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Use Cases

  1. Literature review — Find the most-cited papers in any field
  2. Trend analysis — Track research volume over time
  3. Author discovery — Find top researchers in a niche
  4. Citation networks — Map how ideas spread
  5. Competitive intelligence — What are companies publishing?
  6. Content creation — Back your articles with real research data

Compared to Other APIs

API Papers Free? Key needed?
OpenAlex 250M+ Yes No
Semantic Scholar 200M+ Yes Optional
Crossref 150M+ Yes No
arXiv 2M+ Yes No
PubMed 36M+ Yes No

OpenAlex has the most papers AND the simplest API. Start here.

More Free APIs

If you like free APIs with no auth, I curated 150+ of them:

What would you build with 250M papers? Drop your ideas in the comments.

I find free APIs and build tools around them. Follow for weekly API discoveries.

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