open-index/open-alex

OpenAlex: Complete Academic Research Database

The world's scholarly research catalog, converted to analysis-ready Parquet. 114.1M records across 7 entity types.

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
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