OpenAlex API: Search 250M+ Research Papers for Free (No API Key)

OpenAlex has 250 million research papers, and their API is completely free with no API key required . No rate limits for polite use. No authentication. Just curl and go. This is the most underrated free API I've found. Quick Test curl "https://api.openalex.org/works?search=machine+learning&per_page=3" That's it. 250M papers, zero setup. Python Client import requests def search_papers ( query , limit = 10 ): url = " https://api.openalex.org/works " params = { " search " : query , " per_page " : limit , " sort " : " cited_by_count:desc " } response = requests . get ( url , params = params ) data = response . json () for paper in data [ " results " ]: title = paper [ " title " ] year = paper . get ( " publication_year " , " ? " ) citations = paper . get ( " cited_by_count " , 0 ) doi = paper . get ( " doi " , " no DOI " ) print ( f " [ { year } ] { title } " ) print ( f " Citations: { citations } | DOI: { doi } " ) print () search_papers ( " transformer neural network " , limit = 5 ) What