What is OpenAlex?
At the heart of OpenAlex is our dataset—a catalog of works. A work is any sort of scholarly output. A research article is one kind of work, but there are others such as datasets, books, and dissertations. We keep track of these works—their titles (and abstracts and full text in many cases), when they were created, etc. But that’s not all we do. We also keep track of the connections between these works, finding associations through things like journals, authors, institutional affiliations, citations, concepts, and funders. There are hundreds of millions of works out there, and tens of thousands more being created every day, so it’s important that we have these relationships to help us make sense of research at a large scale.
This type of data is a valuable resource to institutions, researchers, governments, publishers, funders, and anyone else interested in global research and scholarly communication. We offer the data freely so that its value can be shared. Using the website, anyone can get started right away exploring the data to learn about all sorts of things, from individual papers, to global research trends.