Get a single work

It's easy to get a work from from the API with: /works/<entity_id> Here's an example:

• Get the work with the W2741809807: https://api.openalex.org/works/W2741809807

That will return a Work object, describing everything OpenAlex knows about the work with that ID.

{
    "id": "https://openalex.org/W2741809807",
    "doi": "https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375",
    "title": "The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles",
    "display_name": "The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles",
    "publication_year": 2018,
    "publication_date": "2018-02-13",
    // other fields removed for brevity
}

External IDs

You can look up works using external IDs such as a DOI:

• Get the work with this DOI: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375: https://api.openalex.org/works/https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375

You can use the full ID or a shorter Uniform Resource Name (URN) format like so:

• Get the work with PubMed ID: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14907713: https://api.openalex.org/works/pmid:14907713

Available external IDs for works are:

Select fields

You can use select to limit the fields that are returned in a work object. More details are here.

• Display only the id and display_name for a work object https://api.openalex.org/works/W2741809807?select=id,display_name