Know Your Resources: OpenAlex

OpenAlex is a free, open catalog of the world’s scholarly research system. It provides structured metadata about research works (articles, books, datasets, preprints, etc.) and the entities connected to them (authors, institutions, sources/journals, topics, funders, publishers). 

​OpenAlex indexes “450 million scholarly works, from journal articles and dissertations to datasets and preprints. The collection includes 60 million fulltext PDFs, 200,000 journals and repositories, 100,000 institutions, 100 million authors, 11 million grants, and over 2 billion citation links.”

​All OpenAlex data is released under CC0 (Creative Commons Zero), meaning the data has been released into the public domain for unrestricted use by anyone, for any purpose, without needing permission or attribution. 

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​What You Can Do With It

Use OpenAlex to:

• Find research works on a topic, by an author, from an institution, or in a specific journal/source. 
• Analyze a set of results using built-in summaries (e.g. open access breakdowns, citation totals) in the website interface. 
• Export results for offline analysis or reference management. 

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How To Use OpenAlex

​1) Search
Go to OpenAlex and search for a topic, author, institution, or journal/source. Click a result to view the associated works and available filters. 

2) Filter To Open Access Only
OpenAlex includes Open Access metadata for works and supports filtering by:

• Open Access — Whether the work has a free-to-read full text link available. 
• OA Status — Categorical labels such as diamond, gold, green, hybrid, bronze, closed. These labels are defined in OpenAlex’s OA documentation.

3) Omit Retracted Works
OpenAlex enables users to remove retracted items: Use ‘Add filter’, find “retracted”, and set it to “is not”. 

4) Export What You Found
Above a Works results set, use ‘Export’ to download results. Website exports are limited to a maximum of 100,000 works. 

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Why This Resource Belongs In Your Toolkit

​OpenAlex is a CC0-licensed, searchable map of research outputs and their relationships, built to support discovery and analysis without requiring a paywalled index. If you’re doing research support, collection intelligence, bibliometrics, or simply trying to understand how scholarship connects across authors, institutions, and topics—OpenAlex is worth knowing.

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Sources

• OpenAlex
  • https://openalex.org/
• OpenAlex Help — Open Access (OA)
  • https://help.openalex.org/hc/en-us/articles/24347035046295-Open-Access-OA

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​Image generated with ChatGPT.