Search concepts
These are the original OpenAlex Concepts, which are being deprecated in favor ofTopics. We will continue to provide these Concepts for Works, but we will not be actively maintaining, updating, or providing support for these concepts. Unless you have a good reason to be relying on them, we encourage you to look intoTopics instead.
The best way to search for concepts is to use thesearch query parameter, which searches thedisplay_name anddescription fields. Example:
Search concepts'
display_nameanddescriptionfor "artificial intelligence":https://api.openalex.org/concepts?search=artificial intelligence
You can read more about searchhere. It will show you how relevance score is calculated, how words are stemmed to improve search results, and how to do complex boolean searches.
Search a specific field
You can also use search as afilter, allowing you to fine-tune the fields you're searching over. To do this, you append.search to the end of the property you are filtering for:
Get concepts with "medical" in the
display_name:https://api.openalex.org/concepts?filter=display_name.search:medical
The following field can be searched as a filter within concepts:
You can also use the filterdefault.search, which works the same as using thesearch parameter.
Autocomplete concepts
You can autocomplete concepts to create a very fast type-ahead style search function:
Autocomplete concepts with "comp" in the
display_name:https://api.openalex.org/autocomplete/concepts?q=comp
This returns a list of concepts with the description set as the hint:
{"results": [ {"id":"https://openalex.org/C41008148","display_name":"Computer science","hint":"theoretical study of the formal foundation enabling the automated processing or computation of information, for example on a computer or over a data transmission network","cited_by_count":392939277,"works_count":76722605,"entity_type":"concept","external_id":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21198" }, ... ]}Read more in theautocomplete page in the API guide.
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