omnischolar/openalex

OpenAlex for omnisense/omnischolar: an author's profile with their counts (works, citations, h-index, i10-index, by year) and the institutions seen on their works; their works with abstracts, citations and open-access links; any work by its OpenAlex id, DOI or PubMed id; a search. The source calls OpenAlex's API:

Every call carries mailto and api_key when they are set. The base address is OpenAlexSource::BASE_URI (https://api.openalex.org/). There is no sandbox.

Installation

composer require omnischolar/openalex

Requires PHP 8.2, omnisense/omnischolar (1.x) and symfony/http-client (6.4, 7 or 8). In a Symfony application with OmnischolarBundle, the factory is registered as soon as the package is installed.

Credentials

None needed: OpenAlex is free without a key within a daily budget. A free key (openalex.org/settings/api) raises it tenfold (api_key). OpenAlex asks polite callers for a contact address (mailto).

Options

paratext is read as a boolean whatever its spelling (Config::bool()): 'false', '0', 'no' or 'off' keeps the filter, a value that is no boolean is an InvalidConfigException.

Capabilities

capabilities(): author, works, work, search, metrics, citations, abstracts, open_access, affiliations.

Behaviour

Lists. from/to → publication_year:>N, <N or from-to; types → type: with OpenAlex's types for each kind (article, review, letter; book; book-chapter, reference-entry; conference-paper; preprint; dissertation; report, standard; dataset, supplementary-materials; software; peer-review; editorial, erratum, retraction, paratext; other, libguides); openAccess → open_access.is_oa; domains is refused. sort: oldest → publication_date:asc, cited → cited_by_count:desc, relevance → relevance_score:desc with a text (else newest), any other → publication_date:desc. per-page = limit 1 to 100; the cursor is OpenAlex's (* first, next_cursor after); Page::$total is meta.count. Only the fields the models read are asked (select).

An author. The display name and its alternatives, OpenAlex id and ORCID; Metrics (works, citations, h-index, i10-index, two-year mean citedness, works and citations by year, oldest first); the institutions seen on the works as Affiliation::OBSERVED, with their years, first and last, country, ROR, OpenAlex address, the last known ones current; the OpenAlex page as urls; the top ten topics as keywords; the country of the last known institution. No positions nor degrees: the institutions are inferred from the works.

A work. Title; type (an article in a conference source is a conference); authors with their OpenAlex id, ORCID and institutions (the family name from the raw name when it holds a comma); year and date (publication_date: a work known by its year alone is dated January 1st - the Merger prefers other sources' dates); venue (journal, conference, repository, book series, ebook platform; ISSNs; its host organisation as publisher; its OpenAlex id); publisher for books and chapters; volume, issue, pages; the abstract rebuilt from OpenAlex's inverted index (OpenAlexSource::abstract()); language; open access; landing page; the best open-access PDF; licence; citation count; keywords; identifiers: OpenAlex, DOI, PMID, PMCID, and the arXiv or HAL id when a landing page is there (or arXiv's DataCite DOI, 10.48550/arxiv.*).

Example

<?php

require __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php';

use Omnischolar\OpenAlex\OpenAlexSourceFactory;
use Omnischolar\Source\Query;
use Symfony\Component\HttpClient\HttpClient;

$openalex = (new OpenAlexSourceFactory(HttpClient::create()))->create([
    'mailto' => getenv('OMNISCHOLAR_MAILTO') ?: null,
    'api_key' => getenv('OPENALEX_API_KEY') ?: null,
]);

$a = $openalex->author('A5108007452');
echo $a->name, ': ', $a->metrics->works, ' works, ', $a->metrics->citations, ' citations, h-index ', $a->metrics->hIndex, ', ORCID ', $a->orcid(), "\n";
foreach ($openalex->works('A5108007452', new Query(from: 2024, to: 2024)) as $work) {
    printf("  %s  %-10s %s - %s cited %d\n", $work->date, $work->type->value, mb_substr($work->fullTitle(), 0, 80), $work->venue?->name, $work->citations);
}

Keitaro Nakatani: 387 works, 9717 citations, h-index 53, ORCID 0009-0005-1387-7295
  2024-10-04  article    Complete kinetic and photochemical characterization of the multi-step photochrom - Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics cited 1
  2024-09-25  article    Cascade Fluorescence Modulation in Photochromic Microcapsules - ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces cited 5
  2024-09-03  article    Tuning the Thermal Stability of Tetra ‐ o– chloroazobenzene Derivatives by Trans - Chemistry - A European Journal cited 7
  2024-01-01  article    Acid-sensitive photoswitches: towards catalytic on-demand release of stored ligh - Chemical Science cited 8

(called live on 2026-10-26 at 14:18 UTC, from the core's harness image, without a mailto or a key; the last work, known by its year, dated January 1st)

In Symfony:

omnischolar:
    sources:
        openalex: { factory: openalex, options: { mailto: '%env(OMNISCHOLAR_MAILTO)%', api_key: '%env(default::OPENALEX_API_KEY)%' } }

Errors

Verified, and not

Tested offline: Tests/OpenAlexSourceTest.php (10 tests), on MockHttpClient with answers recorded on 2026-10-04 (Keitaro Nakatani, A5108007452): his profile, his 2024 works, the first two pages of his works, a work by DOI. Called live on 2026-10-04, 2026-10-05 and 2026-10-26 (the example above, and the core's first script). Not run with an api_key.

Responsibility

An independent, unofficial client, not affiliated with OurResearch (OpenAlex). Whoever runs it complies with OpenAlex's terms (openalex.org/terms): see the README's Responsibility section.