OpenAlex Has a Free API — Search 250M+ Research Papers (No API Key Needed)

Google Scholar doesn't have an API. Semantic Scholar has rate limits. Web of Science costs $10K+/year. But there's a free alternative that most researchers don't know about: OpenAlex . It indexes 250 million research works , 100K+ journals, and 200M+ authors — and the API needs no key, no signup, no payment. What OpenAlex Gives You 250M+ research papers with abstracts Citation counts and references Author profiles with h-index Institution data Concept/topic classification Open access status Everything downloadable as JSON Quick Start import requests def search_papers ( query , limit = 5 ): """ Search 250M+ papers. No API key needed. """ url = " https://api.openalex.org/works " params = { " search " : query , " per_page " : limit , " sort " : " cited_by_count:desc " # Most cited first } resp = requests . get ( url , params = params ) return resp . json ()[ " results " ] # Search for papers about web scraping papers = search_papers ( " web scraping machine learning " ) for p in papers :