OpenAlex
The fully open, CC0 index that set out to replace Scopus and Web of Science — bigger, free, and built for the Global South.
At a Glance
- Publisher
- OurResearch (US nonprofit)
- Coverage
250M+ works (articles, books, datasets, dissertations) with authors, institutions, sources, topics, and funders disambiguated and linked.
- Access
Free — open REST API (free key required, $1/day of free usage) and a complete database snapshot downloadable in full under CC0.
- Free alternative
- It is the free alternative.
- Regional
Roughly twice the coverage of the paywalled indexes, with markedly better non-English and Global South representation.
Our Take
The successor to Microsoft Academic Graph, and the most consequential open project in research discovery. It aggregates MAG, Crossref, ORCID, ROR, DOAJ, Unpaywall, and PubMed into one openly licensed graph — which means you can do bibliometric analysis at a scale, and a price, that Scopus and WoS can’t touch. For institutions without expensive subscriptions (common across the Global South), it is increasingly the primary citation database, not the backup. The trade-off for breadth is curation: less editorial filtering than WoS, so metadata quality varies and you’ll meet the occasional duplicate or mis-linked author. Treat it as your reach-and-scale layer; verify high-stakes individual records against a curated index.
Power Tips
- Use the free API for bibliometric analysis at scale — citation networks, institutional output, funder analysis — without a subscription.
- Pull the full snapshot when you need reproducible, offline analysis under CC0.
- Cross-check coverage gaps in Scopus or WoS against OpenAlex, especially for non-English and regional literature.
Alternatives & Complements
Scopus, Web of Science, Semantic Scholar, CORE, BASE
Figures last verified: June 15, 2026