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openalexR

R-CMD-check Lifecycle: experimental CRAN status Codecov test coverage Status at rOpenSci Software Peer Review

openalexR helps you interface with the OpenAlex API to retrieve bibliographic information about publications, authors, institutions, sources, funders, publishers, topics and concepts with 5 main functions:

📜 Citation

If you use openalexR in research, please cite:

Aria, M., Le T., Cuccurullo, C., Belfiore, A. & Choe, J. (2024), openalexR: An R-Tool for Collecting Bibliometric Data from OpenAlex, The R Journal, 15(4), 167-180, DOI: https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2023-089.

🙌 Support OpenAlex

If OpenAlex has helped you, consider writing a Testimonial which will help support the OpenAlex team and show that their work is making a real and necessary impact.

⚙️ Setup

You can install the developer version of openalexR from GitHub with:

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("ropensci/openalexR")

You can install the released version of openalexR from CRAN with:

install.packages("openalexR")

Before we go any further, we highly recommend you set openalexR.mailto option so that your requests go to the polite pool for faster response times. If you have OpenAlex Premium, you can add your API key to the openalexR.apikey option as well. These lines best go into .Rprofile with file.edit("~/.Rprofile").

options(openalexR.mailto = "example@email.com")
options(openalexR.apikey = "EXAMPLE_APIKEY")

Alternatively, you can open .Renviron with file.edit("~/.Renviron") and add:

openalexR.mailto = example@email.com
openalexR.apikey = EXAMPLE_APIKEY
library(openalexR)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)

🌿 Examples

There are different filters/arguments you can use in oa_fetch, depending on which entity you’re interested in: works, authors, sources, funders, institutions, or concepts. We show a few examples below.

📚 Works

Goal: Download all information about a givens set of publications (known DOIs).

Use doi as a works filter:

works_from_dois <- oa_fetch(
  entity = "works",
  doi = c("10.1016/j.joi.2017.08.007", "https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1221-3"),
  verbose = TRUE
)
#> Requesting url: https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=doi%3A10.1016%2Fj.joi.2017.08.007%7Chttps%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.1007%2Fs11192-013-1221-3
#> Getting 1 page of results with a total of 2 records...

We can view the output tibble/dataframe, works_from_dois, interactively in RStudio or inspect it with base functions like str or head. We also provide the experimental show_works function to simplify the result (e.g., remove some columns, keep first/last author) for easy viewing.

Note: the following table is wrapped in knitr::kable() to be displayed nicely in this README, but you will most likely not need this function.

# str(works_from_dois, max.level = 2)
# head(works_from_dois)
# show_works(works_from_dois)

works_from_dois |>
  show_works() |>
  knitr::kable()
id display_name first_author last_author so url is_oa top_concepts
W2755950973 bibliometrix : An R-tool for comprehensive science mapping analysis Massimo Aria Corrado Cuccurullo Journal of informetrics https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2017.08.007 FALSE Workflow, Bibliometrics, Software
W2038196424 Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community Stefanie Haustein Jens Terliesner Scientometrics https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1221-3 FALSE Altmetrics, Bookmarking, Social media

Goal: Download all works published by a set of authors (known ORCIDs).

Use author.orcid as a filter (either canonical form with https://orcid.org/ or without will work):

works_from_orcids <- oa_fetch(
  entity = "works",
  author.orcid = c("0000-0001-6187-6610", "0000-0002-8517-9411"),
  verbose = TRUE
)
#> Requesting url: https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=author.orcid%3A0000-0001-6187-6610%7C0000-0002-8517-9411
#> Getting 2 pages of results with a total of 260 records...
#> Warning in oa_request(oa_query(filter = filter_i, multiple_id = multiple_id, : 
#> The following work(s) have truncated lists of authors: W4230863633.
#> Query each work separately by its identifier to get full list of authors.
#> For example:
#>   lapply(c("W4230863633"), \(x) oa_fetch(identifier = x))
#> Details at https://docs.openalex.org/api-entities/authors/limitations.

works_from_orcids |>
  show_works() |>
  knitr::kable()
id display_name first_author last_author so url is_oa top_concepts
W2755950973 bibliometrix : An R-tool for comprehensive science mapping analysis Massimo Aria Corrado Cuccurullo Journal of informetrics https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2017.08.007 FALSE Workflow, Bibliometrics, Software
W2741809807 The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles Heather Piwowar Stefanie Haustein PeerJ https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375 TRUE Citation, License, Bibliometrics
W2122130843 Scientometrics 2.0: New metrics of scholarly impact on the social Web Jason Priem Bradely H. Hemminger First Monday https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i7.2874 FALSE Bookmarking, Altmetrics, Social media
W3005144120 Mapping the Evolution of Social Research and Data Science on 30 Years of Social Indicators Research Massimo Aria Maria Spano Social indicators research https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02281-3 FALSE Human geography, Data collection, Position (finance)
W2038196424 Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community Stefanie Haustein Jens Terliesner Scientometrics https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1221-3 FALSE Altmetrics, Bookmarking, Social media
W2408216567 Foundations and trends in performance management. A twenty-five years bibliometric analysis in business and public administration domains Corrado Cuccurullo Fabrizia Sarto Scientometrics https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1948-8 FALSE Domain (mathematical analysis), Content analysis, Public domain

Goal: Download all works that have been cited more than 50 times, published between 2020 and 2021, and include the strings “bibliometric analysis” or “science mapping” in the title. Maybe we also want the results to be sorted by total citations in a descending order.

works_search <- oa_fetch(
  entity = "works",
  title.search = c("bibliometric analysis", "science mapping"),
  cited_by_count = ">50",
  from_publication_date = "2020-01-01",
  to_publication_date = "2021-12-31",
  options = list(sort = "cited_by_count:desc"),
  verbose = TRUE
)
#> Requesting url: https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=title.search%3Abibliometric%20analysis%7Cscience%20mapping%2Ccited_by_count%3A%3E50%2Cfrom_publication_date%3A2020-01-01%2Cto_publication_date%3A2021-12-31&sort=cited_by_count%3Adesc
#> Getting 2 pages of results with a total of 258 records...

works_search |>
  show_works() |>
  knitr::kable()
id display_name first_author last_author so url is_oa top_concepts
W3160856016 How to conduct a bibliometric analysis: An overview and guidelines Naveen Donthu Weng Marc Lim Journal of business research https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.04.070 TRUE Bibliometrics, Field (mathematics), Resource (disambiguation)
W3038273726 Investigating the emerging COVID-19 research trends in the field of business and management: A bibliometric analysis approach Surabhi Verma Anders Gustafsson Journal of business research https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.06.057 TRUE Bibliometrics, Field (mathematics), Empirical research
W3001491100 Software tools for conducting bibliometric analysis in science: An up-to-date review José A. Moral-Muñoz Manuel J. Cobo ˜El œProfesional de la información https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2020.ene.03 TRUE Bibliometrics, Visualization, Set (abstract data type)
W2990450011 Forty-five years of Journal of Business Research: A bibliometric analysis Naveen Donthu Debidutta Pattnaik Journal of business research https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.10.039 FALSE Publishing, Bibliometrics, Empirical research
W3044902155 Financial literacy: A systematic review and bibliometric analysis Kirti Goyal Satish Kumar International journal of consumer studies https://doi.org/10.1111/ijcs.12605 FALSE Financial literacy, Content analysis, Citation
W2990688366 A bibliometric analysis of board diversity: Current status, development, and future research directions H. Kent Baker Arunima Haldar Journal of business research https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.11.025 FALSE Diversity (politics), Ethnic group, Bibliometrics

🧑 Authors

Goal: Download author information when we know their ORCID.

Here, instead of author.orcid like earlier, we have to use orcid as an argument. This may be a little confusing, but again, a different entity (authors instead of works) requires a different set of filters.

authors_from_orcids <- oa_fetch(
  entity = "authors",
  orcid = c("0000-0001-6187-6610", "0000-0002-8517-9411")
)

authors_from_orcids |>
  show_authors() |>
  knitr::kable()
id display_name orcid works_count cited_by_count affiliation_display_name top_concepts
A5069892096 Massimo Aria 0000-0002-8517-9411 192 8282 University of Naples Federico II Physiology, Pathology and Forensic Medicine, Periodontics
A5023888391 Jason Priem 0000-0001-6187-6610 67 2541 OurResearch Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty, Information Systems, Communication

Goal: Acquire information on the authors of this package.

We can use other filters such as display_name and has_orcid:

authors_from_names <- oa_fetch(
  entity = "authors",
  display_name = c("Massimo Aria", "Jason Priem"),
  has_orcid = TRUE
)
authors_from_names |>
  show_authors() |>
  knitr::kable()
id display_name orcid works_count cited_by_count affiliation_display_name top_concepts
A5069892096 Massimo Aria 0000-0002-8517-9411 192 8282 University of Naples Federico II Physiology, Pathology and Forensic Medicine, Periodontics
A5023888391 Jason Priem 0000-0001-6187-6610 67 2541 OurResearch Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty, Information Systems, Communication

Goal: Download all authors’ records of scholars who work at the University of Naples Federico II (OpenAlex ID: I71267560) and have published at least 500 publications.

Let’s first check how many records match the query, then download the entire collection. We can do this by first defining a list of arguments, then adding count_only (default FALSE) to this list:

my_arguments <- list(
  entity = "authors",
  last_known_institutions.id = "I71267560",
  works_count = ">499"
)

do.call(oa_fetch, c(my_arguments, list(count_only = TRUE)))
#>      count db_response_time_ms page per_page
#> [1,]    36                 177    1        1

if (do.call(oa_fetch, c(my_arguments, list(count_only = TRUE)))[1]>0){
do.call(oa_fetch, my_arguments) |>
  show_authors() |>
  knitr::kable()
}
id display_name orcid works_count cited_by_count affiliation_display_name top_concepts
A5063152727 L. Lista 0000-0001-6471-5492 2374 73504 INFN Sezione di Napoli Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
A5069689088 C. Sciacca 0000-0002-8412-4072 2372 60702 INFN Sezione di Napoli Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
A5019451576 Alberto Orso Maria Iorio 0000-0002-3798-1135 1227 29599 INFN Sezione di Napoli Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
A5078843367 G. De Nardo NA 968 28236 University of Naples Federico II Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
A5076706548 Salvatore Capozziello 0000-0003-4886-2024 930 34384 University of Naples Federico II Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Astronomy and Astrophysics
A5023058736 Francesco Fienga 0000-0001-5978-4952 846 17271 University of Naples Federico II Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

🍒 Example analyses

Goal: track the popularity of Biology concepts over time.

We first download the records of all level-1 concepts/keywords that concern over one million works:

library(gghighlight)
concept_df <- oa_fetch(
  entity = "concepts",
  level = 1,
  ancestors.id = "https://openalex.org/C86803240", # Biology
  works_count = ">1000000"
)

concept_df |>
  select(display_name, counts_by_year) |>
  tidyr::unnest(counts_by_year) |>
  filter(year < 2022) |>
  ggplot() +
  aes(x = year, y = works_count, color = display_name) +
  facet_wrap(~display_name) +
  geom_line(linewidth = 0.7) +
  scale_color_brewer(palette = "Dark2") +
  labs(
    x = NULL, y = "Works count",
    title = "Virology spiked in 2020."
  ) +
  guides(color = "none") +
  gghighlight(
    max(works_count) > 200000,
    min(works_count) < 400000,
    label_params = list(nudge_y = 10^5, segment.color = NA)
  )
#> label_key: display_name

Goal: Rank institutions in Italy by total number of citations.

We want download all records regarding Italian institutions (country_code:it) that are classified as educational (type:education). Again, we check how many records match the query then download the collection:

italy_insts <- oa_fetch(
  entity = "institutions",
  country_code = "it",
  type = "education",
  verbose = TRUE
)
#> Requesting url: https://api.openalex.org/institutions?filter=country_code%3Ait%2Ctype%3Aeducation
#> Getting 2 pages of results with a total of 232 records...

italy_insts |>
  slice_max(cited_by_count, n = 8) |>
  mutate(display_name = forcats::fct_reorder(display_name, cited_by_count)) |>
  ggplot() +
  aes(x = cited_by_count, y = display_name, fill = display_name) +
  geom_col() +
  scale_fill_viridis_d(option = "E") +
  guides(fill = "none") +
  labs(
    x = "Total citations", y = NULL,
    title = "Italian references"
  ) +
  coord_cartesian(expand = FALSE)

And what do they publish on?

# The package wordcloud needs to be installed to run this chunk
# library(wordcloud)

concept_cloud <- italy_insts |>
  select(inst_id = id, topics) |>
  tidyr::unnest(topics) |>
  filter(name == "field") |>
  select(display_name, count) |>
  group_by(display_name) |>
  summarise(score = sqrt(sum(count)))

pal <- c("black", scales::brewer_pal(palette = "Set1")(5))
set.seed(1)
wordcloud::wordcloud(
  concept_cloud$display_name,
  concept_cloud$score,
  scale = c(2, .4),
  colors = pal
)

Goal: Visualize big journals’ topics.

We first download all records regarding journals that have published more than 300,000 works, then visualize their scored concepts:

# The package ggtext needs to be installed to run this chunk
# library(ggtext)

jours_all <- oa_fetch(
  entity = "sources",
  works_count = ">200000",
  verbose = TRUE
)

clean_journal_name <- function(x) {
  x |>
    gsub("\\(.*?\\)", "", x = _) |>
    gsub("Journal of the|Journal of", "J.", x = _) |>
    gsub("/.*", "", x = _)
}

jours <- jours_all |>
  filter(type == "journal") |>
  slice_max(cited_by_count, n = 9) |>
  distinct(display_name, .keep_all = TRUE) |>
  select(jour = display_name, topics) |>
  tidyr::unnest(topics) |>
  filter(name == "field") |>
  group_by(id, jour, display_name) |> 
  summarise(score = (sum(count))^(1/3), .groups = "drop") |> 
  left_join(concept_abbrev, by = join_by(id, display_name)) |>
  mutate(
    abbreviation = gsub(" ", "<br>", abbreviation),
    jour = clean_journal_name(jour),
  ) |>
  tidyr::complete(jour, abbreviation, fill = list(score = 0)) |>
  group_by(jour) |>
  mutate(
    color = if_else(score > 10, "#1A1A1A", "#D9D9D9"), # CCCCCC
    label = paste0("<span style='color:", color, "'>", abbreviation, "</span>")
  ) |>
  ungroup()

jours |>
  ggplot() +
  aes(fill = jour, y = score, x = abbreviation, group = jour) +
  facet_wrap(~jour) +
  geom_hline(yintercept = c(25, 50), colour = "grey90", linewidth = 0.2) +
  geom_segment(
    aes(x = abbreviation, xend = abbreviation, y = 0, yend = 55),
    color = "grey95"
  ) +
  geom_col(color = "grey20") +
  coord_polar(clip = "off") +
  theme_bw() +
  theme(
    plot.background = element_rect(fill = "transparent", colour = NA),
    panel.background = element_rect(fill = "transparent", colour = NA),
    panel.grid = element_blank(),
    panel.border = element_blank(),
    axis.text = element_blank(),
    axis.ticks.y = element_blank()
  ) +
  ggtext::geom_richtext(
    aes(y = 75, label = label),
    fill = NA, label.color = NA, size = 3
  ) +
  scale_fill_brewer(palette = "Set1", guide = "none") +
  labs(y = NULL, x = NULL, title = "Journal clocks")

The user can also perform snowballing with oa_snowball. Snowballing is a literature search technique where the researcher starts with a set of articles and find articles that cite or were cited by the original set. oa_snowball returns a list of 2 elements: nodes and edges. Similar to oa_fetch, oa_snowball finds and returns information on a core set of articles satisfying certain criteria, but, unlike oa_fetch, it also returns information the articles that cite and are cited by this core set.

# The packages ggraph and tidygraph need to be installed to run this chunk
library(ggraph)
library(tidygraph)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'tidygraph'
#> The following object is masked from 'package:stats':
#> 
#>     filter

snowball_docs <- oa_snowball(
  identifier = c("W1964141474", "W1963991285"),
  verbose = TRUE
)
#> Requesting url: https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=openalex%3AW1964141474%7CW1963991285
#> Getting 1 page of results with a total of 2 records...
#> Collecting all documents citing the target papers...
#> Requesting url: https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=cites%3AW1963991285%7CW1964141474
#> Getting 3 pages of results with a total of 540 records...
#> Collecting all documents cited by the target papers...
#> Requesting url: https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=cited_by%3AW1963991285%7CW1964141474
#> Getting 1 page of results with a total of 91 records...

ggraph(graph = as_tbl_graph(snowball_docs), layout = "stress") +
  geom_edge_link(aes(alpha = after_stat(index)), show.legend = FALSE) +
  geom_node_point(aes(fill = oa_input, size = cited_by_count), shape = 21, color = "white") +
  geom_node_label(aes(filter = oa_input, label = id), nudge_y = 0.2, size = 3) +
  scale_edge_width(range = c(0.1, 1.5), guide = "none") +
  scale_size(range = c(3, 10), guide = "none") +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("#a3ad62", "#d46780"), na.value = "grey", name = "") +
  theme_graph() +
  theme(
    plot.background = element_rect(fill = "transparent", colour = NA),
    panel.background = element_rect(fill = "transparent", colour = NA),
    legend.position = "bottom"
  ) +
  guides(fill = "none")

🌾 N-grams

OpenAlex offers (limited) support for fulltext N-grams of Work entities (these have IDs starting with "W"). Given a vector of work IDs, oa_ngrams returns a dataframe of N-gram data (in the ngrams list-column) for each work.

ngrams_data <- oa_ngrams(
  works_identifier = c("W1964141474", "W1963991285"),
  verbose = TRUE
)

ngrams_data
#> # A tibble: 2 × 4
#>   id                               doi                              count ngrams
#>   <chr>                            <chr>                            <int> <list>
#> 1 https://openalex.org/W1964141474 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.…  2733 <df>  
#> 2 https://openalex.org/W1963991285 https://doi.org/10.1126/science…  2338 <df>

lapply(ngrams_data$ngrams, head, 3)
#> [[1]]
#>                                        ngram ngram_count ngram_tokens
#> 1                 brain basis and core cause           2            5
#> 2                     cause be not yet fully           2            5
#> 3 include structural and functional magnetic           2            5
#>   term_frequency
#> 1   0.0006637902
#> 2   0.0006637902
#> 3   0.0006637902
#> 
#> [[2]]
#>                                          ngram ngram_count ngram_tokens
#> 1          intact but less accessible phonetic           1            5
#> 2 accessible phonetic representation in Adults           1            5
#> 3       representation in Adults with Dyslexia           1            5
#>   term_frequency
#> 1   0.0003756574
#> 2   0.0003756574
#> 3   0.0003756574

ngrams_data |>
  tidyr::unnest(ngrams) |>
  filter(ngram_tokens == 2) |>
  select(id, ngram, ngram_count) |>
  group_by(id) |>
  slice_max(ngram_count, n = 10, with_ties = FALSE) |>
  ggplot(aes(ngram_count, forcats::fct_reorder(ngram, ngram_count))) +
  geom_col(aes(fill = id), show.legend = FALSE) +
  facet_wrap(~id, scales = "free_y") +
  labs(
    title = "Top 10 fulltext bigrams",
    x = "Count",
    y = NULL
  )

oa_ngrams can sometimes be slow because the N-grams data can get pretty big, but given that the N-grams are "cached via CDN"](https://docs.openalex.org/api-entities/works/get-n-grams#api-endpoint), you may also consider parallelizing for this special case (oa_ngrams does this automatically if you have {curl} >= v5.0.0).

💫 About OpenAlex

oar-img

Schema credits: @dhimmel

OpenAlex is a fully open catalog of the global research system. It’s named after the ancient Library of Alexandria. The OpenAlex dataset describes scholarly entities and how those entities are connected to each other. There are five types of entities:

🤝 Code of Conduct

Please note that this package is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

👓 Acknowledgements

Package hex was made with Midjourney and thus inherits a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
Health stats visible at Monitor.