Page through Results

Basic paging

Use page and per_page to navigate results:

There is no fixed cap on page itself — the limit is on how deep you can go: page × per_page must not exceed 10,000 (see the warning below).

# Page 2 with 100 results per page
https://api.openalex.org/works?page=2&per_page=100

Warning: Basic paging limit: You can only access the first 10,000 results (page * per_page must not exceed 10,000). Use cursor paging for more.

Note: The API currently accepts per_page=200 as legacy behavior, but this is deprecated and will be removed — don’t rely on it. 100 is the supported maximum.

Cursor paging

Cursor paging lets you access any number of results:

Step 1: Start with cursor=*

https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=publication_year:2020&per_page=100&cursor=*

Step 2: Get the next_cursor from the response:

{
  "meta": {
    "count": 8695857,
    "per_page": 100,
    "next_cursor": "IlsxNjA5MzcyODAwMDAwLCAnaHR0cHM..."
  },
  "results": ["..."]
}

Step 3: Use next_cursor for the next page:

https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=publication_year:2020&per_page=100&cursor=IlsxNjA5MzcyODAwMDAwLCAnaHR0cHM...

Repeat until next_cursor is null and results is empty.

Note: Cursor paging also works with group_by. To page through more than 200 groups, follow next_cursor exactly as shown above. Basic page-based paging (page=2, …) is not supported for grouped results — you must use cursor paging. See Group.

Warning: Don’t use cursor paging to download the entire dataset.

• It takes days to page through /works or /authors
• It puts heavy load on our servers

Instead, use the OpenAlex snapshot for bulk downloads. It’s free, fast, and gives you the same data format.

Jupyter notebook

See this community notebook for executable paging examples.