OpenAlex API: Search 250M+ Academic Papers for Free (No Key, No Limits)

Why OpenAlex? Most developers know about Google Scholar, but few know about OpenAlex — a completely free, open API with 250 million+ academic works , 100K+ journals, and 90M+ authors. No API key. No rate limits (polite pool). No paywall. I used it to build a research assistant that finds papers by topic, tracks citation networks, and discovers trending research areas — all with simple HTTP requests. Quick Start: Search Papers import requests def search_papers ( query , per_page = 5 ): url = " https://api.openalex.org/works " params = { " search " : query , " per_page " : per_page , " sort " : " cited_by_count:desc " } resp = requests . get ( url , params = params ) data = resp . json () for work in data [ " results " ]: title = work [ " title " ] year = work [ " publication_year " ] citations = work [ " cited_by_count " ] doi = work . get ( " doi " , " N/A " ) print ( f " [ { year } ] { title } " ) print ( f " Citations: { citations } | DOI: { doi } " ) print () search_papers ( " large