metadata
language:
- en
license: cc0-1.0
task_categories:
- feature-extraction
- text-classification
- question-answering
pretty_name: OpenAlex - Complete Academic Research Database
size_categories:
- 100M<n<1B
source_datasets:
- openalex
tags:
- academic
- research
- scholarly
- citations
- science
- open-access
- parquet
- bibliometrics
- scientometrics
dataset_info:
- config_name: topics
features:
- name: id
dtype: string
- name: display_name
dtype: string
- name: description
dtype: string
- name: keywords
dtype: string
- name: subfield_id
dtype: string
- name: subfield_name
dtype: string
- name: field_id
dtype: string
- name: field_name
dtype: string
- name: domain_id
dtype: string
- name: domain_name
dtype: string
- name: siblings
dtype: string
- name: works_count
dtype: int32
- name: cited_by_count
dtype: int32
- name: ids
dtype: string
- name: created_date
dtype: string
- name: updated_date
dtype: string
- config_name: publishers
features:
- name: id
dtype: string
- name: display_name
dtype: string
- name: alternate_titles
dtype: string
- name: hierarchy_level
dtype: int32
- name: parent_publisher
dtype: string
- name: country_codes
dtype: string
- name: homepage_url
dtype: string
- name: works_count
dtype: int32
- name: cited_by_count
dtype: int32
- name: h_index
dtype: int32
- name: i10_index
dtype: int32
- name: lineage
dtype: string
- name: roles
dtype: string
- name: counts_by_year
dtype: string
- name: ids
dtype: string
- name: created_date
dtype: string
- name: updated_date
dtype: string
- config_name: funders
features:
- name: id
dtype: string
- name: display_name
dtype: string
- name: alternate_titles
dtype: string
- name: country_code
dtype: string
- name: description
dtype: string
- name: homepage_url
dtype: string
- name: works_count
dtype: int32
- name: cited_by_count
dtype: int32
- name: awards_count
dtype: int32
- name: h_index
dtype: int32
- name: i10_index
dtype: int32
- name: roles
dtype: string
- name: counts_by_year
dtype: string
- name: ids
dtype: string
- name: created_date
dtype: string
- name: updated_date
dtype: string
- config_name: sources
features:
- name: id
dtype: string
- name: issn_l
dtype: string
- name: issn
dtype: string
- name: display_name
dtype: string
- name: type
dtype: string
- name: host_organization
dtype: string
- name: host_organization_name
dtype: string
- name: works_count
dtype: int32
- name: cited_by_count
dtype: int32
- name: is_oa
dtype: bool
- name: is_in_doaj
dtype: bool
- name: is_core
dtype: bool
- name: homepage_url
dtype: string
- name: country_code
dtype: string
- name: h_index
dtype: int32
- name: i10_index
dtype: int32
- name: apc_usd
dtype: int32
- name: alternate_titles
dtype: string
- name: topics
dtype: string
- name: counts_by_year
dtype: string
- name: ids
dtype: string
- name: created_date
dtype: string
- name: updated_date
dtype: string
- config_name: institutions
features:
- name: id
dtype: string
- name: ror
dtype: string
- name: display_name
dtype: string
- name: type
dtype: string
- name: country_code
dtype: string
- name: homepage_url
dtype: string
- name: image_url
dtype: string
- name: works_count
dtype: int32
- name: cited_by_count
dtype: int32
- name: h_index
dtype: int32
- name: i10_index
dtype: int32
- name: geo_city
dtype: string
- name: geo_region
dtype: string
- name: geo_country
dtype: string
- name: geo_latitude
dtype: float64
- name: geo_longitude
dtype: float64
- name: associated_institutions
dtype: string
- name: lineage
dtype: string
- name: topics
dtype: string
- name: counts_by_year
dtype: string
- name: roles
dtype: string
- name: ids
dtype: string
- name: created_date
dtype: string
- name: updated_date
dtype: string
- config_name: authors
features:
- name: id
dtype: string
- name: orcid
dtype: string
- name: display_name
dtype: string
- name: display_name_alternatives
dtype: string
- name: works_count
dtype: int32
- name: cited_by_count
dtype: int32
- name: h_index
dtype: int32
- name: i10_index
dtype: int32
- name: two_yr_mean_citedness
dtype: float64
- name: affiliations
dtype: string
- name: last_known_institutions
dtype: string
- name: topics
dtype: string
- name: topic_share
dtype: string
- name: counts_by_year
dtype: string
- name: ids
dtype: string
- name: created_date
dtype: string
- name: updated_date
dtype: string
- config_name: works
features:
- name: id
dtype: string
- name: doi
dtype: string
- name: title
dtype: string
- name: publication_year
dtype: int32
- name: publication_date
dtype: string
- name: type
dtype: string
- name: language
dtype: string
- name: is_retracted
dtype: bool
- name: is_paratext
dtype: bool
- name: cited_by_count
dtype: int32
- name: fwci
dtype: float64
- name: referenced_works_count
dtype: int32
- name: authors_count
dtype: int32
- name: locations_count
dtype: int32
- name: is_oa
dtype: bool
- name: oa_status
dtype: string
- name: oa_url
dtype: string
- name: primary_location
dtype: string
- name: best_oa_location
dtype: string
- name: locations
dtype: string
- name: authorships
dtype: string
- name: biblio_volume
dtype: string
- name: biblio_issue
dtype: string
- name: biblio_first_page
dtype: string
- name: biblio_last_page
dtype: string
- name: primary_topic
dtype: string
- name: topics
dtype: string
- name: keywords
dtype: string
- name: referenced_works
dtype: string
- name: related_works
dtype: string
- name: abstract_inverted_index
dtype: string
- name: ids
dtype: string
- name: counts_by_year
dtype: string
- name: sustainable_development_goals
dtype: string
- name: indexed_in
dtype: string
- name: created_date
dtype: string
- name: updated_date
dtype: string
configs:
- config_name: topics
data_files: data/topics/*.parquet
- config_name: publishers
data_files: data/publishers/*.parquet
- config_name: funders
data_files: data/funders/*.parquet
- config_name: sources
data_files: data/sources/*.parquet
- config_name: institutions
data_files: data/institutions/*.parquet
- config_name: authors
data_files: data/authors/*.parquet
- config_name: works
data_files: data/works/*.parquet
OpenAlex: Complete Academic Research Database
The world's scholarly research catalog, converted to analysis-ready Parquet. 114.1M records across 7 entity types.
Table of Contents
- What is this?
- Quick start
- Entity overview
- How entities connect
- Schema reference
- Working with abstracts
- Pipeline details
- Things to know
- Attribution
What is this?
OpenAlex is a free, open catalog of the global research system: papers, authors, institutions, journals, topics, publishers, and funders. It's maintained by OurResearch as the open replacement for the discontinued Microsoft Academic Graph. The index currently covers over 250 million scholarly works with full citation networks, authorship chains, institutional affiliations, and topic classifications.
This dataset is a straight conversion of the OpenAlex snapshot (2026-04) from gzipped JSON Lines into sharded, ZSTD-compressed Parquet. 114.1M total records split into files of up to 1 million rows each. You can query it directly with DuckDB (no download needed), stream it with the datasets library, or pull specific entities with huggingface_hub.
File layout
data/
works/
works-00000.parquet scholarly works (~1M rows each)
works-00001.parquet
...
authors/
authors-00000.parquet researchers and their metrics
...
sources/
sources-00000.parquet journals, repositories, conferences
institutions/
institutions-00000.parquet universities, labs, companies
topics/
topics-00000.parquet research topic taxonomy
publishers/
publishers-00000.parquet academic publishers
funders/
funders-00000.parquet funding organizations
Nested fields (authorships, locations, topics, etc.) are stored as JSON strings. Use json_extract() in DuckDB or json.loads() in Python to work with them.
Quick start
DuckDB (no download required)
DuckDB can read Parquet files directly from Hugging Face. This is the fastest way to explore:
-- Most-cited works of all time
SELECT id, title, publication_year, cited_by_count, doi, oa_status
FROM 'hf://datasets/open-index/open-alex/data/works/*.parquet'
WHERE cited_by_count > 1000
ORDER BY cited_by_count DESC
LIMIT 20;
-- Top authors by h-index
SELECT id, display_name, h_index, i10_index, works_count, cited_by_count
FROM 'hf://datasets/open-index/open-alex/data/authors/*.parquet'
ORDER BY h_index DESC
LIMIT 20;
-- Open access rates by year
SELECT publication_year,
COUNT(*) as total,
SUM(CASE WHEN is_oa THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) as oa_count,
ROUND(100.0 * SUM(CASE WHEN is_oa THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) / COUNT(*), 1) as oa_pct
FROM 'hf://datasets/open-index/open-alex/data/works/*.parquet'
WHERE publication_year BETWEEN 2000 AND 2025
GROUP BY publication_year
ORDER BY publication_year;
-- Top institutions in a country
SELECT display_name, type, geo_city, works_count, cited_by_count, h_index
FROM 'hf://datasets/open-index/open-alex/data/institutions/*.parquet'
WHERE country_code = 'US'
ORDER BY works_count DESC
LIMIT 20;
-- Extract author affiliations from nested JSON
SELECT id, display_name,
json_extract_string(last_known_institutions, '$[0].display_name') as institution,
json_extract_string(last_known_institutions, '$[0].country_code') as country
FROM 'hf://datasets/open-index/open-alex/data/authors/*.parquet'
WHERE last_known_institutions IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY h_index DESC
LIMIT 20;
-- Join works to their first author
SELECT w.title, w.publication_year, w.cited_by_count, a.display_name, a.h_index
FROM 'hf://datasets/open-index/open-alex/data/works/*.parquet' w,
'hf://datasets/open-index/open-alex/data/authors/*.parquet' a
WHERE w.cited_by_count > 5000
AND a.id = json_extract_string(w.authorships, '$[0].author.id')
ORDER BY w.cited_by_count DESC
LIMIT 20;
-- Citation distribution percentiles
SELECT
percentile_disc(0.50) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY cited_by_count) AS p50,
percentile_disc(0.90) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY cited_by_count) AS p90,
percentile_disc(0.99) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY cited_by_count) AS p99,
AVG(cited_by_count) AS mean
FROM read_parquet('hf://datasets/open-index/open-alex/data/works/*.parquet');
Python (datasets library)
from datasets import load_dataset
# Stream works without downloading everything
ds = load_dataset("open-index/open-alex", "works", split="train", streaming=True)
for work in ds:
print(work["id"], work["title"], work["cited_by_count"])
# Load smaller entities into memory
authors = load_dataset("open-index/open-alex", "authors", split="train")
topics = load_dataset("open-index/open-alex", "topics", split="train")
Downloading specific entities
from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
# Just the small entities (~500 MB total)
snapshot_download(
"open-index/open-alex",
repo_type="dataset",
local_dir="./openalex/",
allow_patterns=["data/topics/*", "data/publishers/*", "data/funders/*",
"data/sources/*", "data/institutions/*"],
)
# For faster downloads:
# pip install huggingface_hub[hf_transfer]
# HF_HUB_ENABLE_HF_TRANSFER=1
Entity overview
| Entity | Records | What's in it |
|---|---|---|
| Topics | 4.5K | Research topics with hierarchical classification (domain → field → subfield → topic) |
| Publishers | 10.7K | Academic publishers with hierarchy levels and country information |
| Funders | 32.4K | Research funding organizations with award counts and cross-references |
| Sources | 280.7K | Journals, repositories, conferences, and ebook platforms with ISSN, DOAJ status, and APC pricing |
| Institutions | 121.5K | Universities, research centers, companies, and government bodies with ROR IDs and geolocation |
| Authors | 113.6M | Researchers with ORCID IDs, h-index, affiliations, and publication statistics |
| Works | n/a | Scholarly works (articles, books, datasets) with citations, DOIs, topics, authorships, and open access status |
How entities connect
Works sit at the center. Everything else links through them.
+---------------+
| Works | (central entity)
+-------+-------+
+----------------+------------------+
| | |
+------v------+ +-----v------+ +---------v--------+
| Authorships | | Locations | | Referenced Works |
| (nested) | | (nested) | | (citations) |
+------+------+ +-----+------+ +------------------+
| |
+------v------+ +---v------+
| Authors | | Sources | journals, repos, conferences
+------+------+ +---+------+
| |
+----------v------+ +---v--------+
| Institutions | | Publishers |
+-----------------+ +------------+
Topics: domain > field > subfield > topic (4-level hierarchy)
Funders: linked to works through grants and awards
Authorships, locations, and topics are nested as JSON inside works. To join works with their authors, parse the authorships field.
Schema reference
Topics
Research topics with hierarchical classification (domain → field → subfield → topic).
| Column | Type |
|---|---|
id |
string |
display_name |
string |
description |
string |
keywords |
string |
subfield_id |
string |
subfield_name |
string |
field_id |
string |
field_name |
string |
domain_id |
string |
domain_name |
string |
siblings |
string |
works_count |
int32 |
cited_by_count |
int32 |
ids |
string |
created_date |
string |
updated_date |
string |
Publishers
Academic publishers with hierarchy levels and country information.
| Column | Type |
|---|---|
id |
string |
display_name |
string |
alternate_titles |
string |
hierarchy_level |
int32 |
parent_publisher |
string |
country_codes |
string |
homepage_url |
string |
works_count |
int32 |
cited_by_count |
int32 |
h_index |
int32 |
i10_index |
int32 |
lineage |
string |
roles |
string |
counts_by_year |
string |
ids |
string |
created_date |
string |
updated_date |
string |
Data completeness (fields below 100%):
| Field | Fill rate | Est. records |
|---|---|---|
alternate_titles |
10.0% | 1.1K |
parent_publisher |
0.0% | 0 |
country_codes |
90.0% | 9.6K |
homepage_url |
80.0% | 8.6K |
counts_by_year |
90.0% | 9.6K |
Funders
Research funding organizations with award counts and cross-references.
| Column | Type |
|---|---|
id |
string |
display_name |
string |
alternate_titles |
string |
country_code |
string |
description |
string |
homepage_url |
string |
works_count |
int32 |
cited_by_count |
int32 |
awards_count |
int32 |
h_index |
int32 |
i10_index |
int32 |
roles |
string |
counts_by_year |
string |
ids |
string |
created_date |
string |
updated_date |
string |
Data completeness (fields below 100%):
| Field | Fill rate | Est. records |
|---|---|---|
alternate_titles |
87.5% | 28.4K |
description |
56.2% | 18.2K |
homepage_url |
53.1% | 17.2K |
Sources
Journals, repositories, conferences, and ebook platforms with ISSN, DOAJ status, and APC pricing.
| Column | Type |
|---|---|
id |
string |
issn_l |
string |
issn |
string |
display_name |
string |
type |
string |
host_organization |
string |
host_organization_name |
string |
works_count |
int32 |
cited_by_count |
int32 |
is_oa |
bool |
is_in_doaj |
bool |
is_core |
bool |
homepage_url |
string |
country_code |
string |
h_index |
int32 |
i10_index |
int32 |
apc_usd |
int32 |
alternate_titles |
string |
topics |
string |
counts_by_year |
string |
ids |
string |
created_date |
string |
updated_date |
string |
Data completeness (fields below 100%):
| Field | Fill rate | Est. records |
|---|---|---|
issn_l |
61.4% | 172.4K |
issn |
61.4% | 172.4K |
host_organization |
25.7% | 72.2K |
host_organization_name |
25.4% | 71.2K |
homepage_url |
26.4% | 74.2K |
country_code |
42.5% | 119.3K |
apc_usd |
3.2% | 9.0K |
alternate_titles |
23.2% | 65.2K |
topics |
92.9% | 260.6K |
counts_by_year |
93.2% | 261.6K |
created_date |
93.2% | 261.6K |
Institutions
Universities, research centers, companies, and government bodies with ROR IDs and geolocation.
| Column | Type |
|---|---|
id |
string |
ror |
string |
display_name |
string |
type |
string |
country_code |
string |
homepage_url |
string |
image_url |
string |
works_count |
int32 |
cited_by_count |
int32 |
h_index |
int32 |
i10_index |
int32 |
geo_city |
string |
geo_region |
string |
geo_country |
string |
geo_latitude |
float64 |
geo_longitude |
float64 |
associated_institutions |
string |
lineage |
string |
topics |
string |
counts_by_year |
string |
roles |
string |
ids |
string |
created_date |
string |
updated_date |
string |
Data completeness (fields below 100%):
| Field | Fill rate | Est. records |
|---|---|---|
country_code |
94.2% | 114.5K |
homepage_url |
99.2% | 120.5K |
image_url |
10.7% | 13.1K |
geo_region |
38.0% | 46.2K |
associated_institutions |
32.2% | 39.2K |
topics |
88.4% | 107.5K |
counts_by_year |
86.8% | 105.4K |
Authors
Researchers with ORCID IDs, h-index, affiliations, and publication statistics.
| Column | Type |
|---|---|
id |
string |
orcid |
string |
display_name |
string |
display_name_alternatives |
string |
works_count |
int32 |
cited_by_count |
int32 |
h_index |
int32 |
i10_index |
int32 |
two_yr_mean_citedness |
float64 |
affiliations |
string |
last_known_institutions |
string |
topics |
string |
topic_share |
string |
counts_by_year |
string |
ids |
string |
created_date |
string |
updated_date |
string |
Data completeness (fields below 100%):
| Field | Fill rate | Est. records |
|---|---|---|
orcid |
7.1% | 8.0M |
affiliations |
44.5% | 50.6M |
last_known_institutions |
39.4% | 44.7M |
topics |
97.2% | 110.5M |
topic_share |
97.2% | 110.5M |
counts_by_year |
99.6% | 113.2M |
Works
Scholarly works (articles, books, datasets) with citations, DOIs, topics, authorships, and open access status.
| Column | Type |
|---|---|
id |
string |
doi |
string |
title |
string |
publication_year |
int32 |
publication_date |
string |
type |
string |
language |
string |
is_retracted |
bool |
is_paratext |
bool |
cited_by_count |
int32 |
fwci |
float64 |
referenced_works_count |
int32 |
authors_count |
int32 |
locations_count |
int32 |
is_oa |
bool |
oa_status |
string |
oa_url |
string |
| `pr |