Workshop 2.1 | Using the OpenAlex API to Explore Metadata for 250M+ Research Publications
Date: Thursday, 2 July 2026, 16:00-18:00
Location: R90
Speaker: Jesper Solheim Johansen, Keenious
As many libraries look for open alternatives to subscription-based databases, OpenAlex has emerged as a major resource. It offers a comprehensive web interface for searching, but unlike many proprietary tools, it also provides fully open access to its underlying data. This dataset contains metadata for hundreds of millions of works, authors, and institutions.
This workshop is a practical introduction to the data side of OpenAlex. We will start by providing an overview of OpenAlex: what it is, what data it contains, and how that information is organized. The main part of the session will be hands-on and focus on accessing data directly through the OpenAlex API. We will use Google Colab to walk through some examples and provide pre-made scripts that allow us to query the data and explore the results immediately in the session. We will explain how the scripts work and allocate time for participants to test their own queries and experiment with the data on their own laptops.
Finally, we will look at how this data is used in the real world. Using Keenious as an example, we will show how we take raw OpenAlex data and use it in a working research tool. We will walk through the process of turning raw data into a finished product and discuss the practical challenges of handling such a large dataset.
NOTE: There are no formal requirements or technical skills needed to attend this session. However, to take part in the hands-on exercises, we recommend bringing a laptop and having a Google account ready, as we will be using Google Colab.