Funders
A funder is an organization that funds research — a government agency, foundation, or charity. OpenAlex tracks about 45,000 funders, and each connects to the works it funded and to the specific awards (grants) that funded them. A funder’s OpenAlex ID looks like F4320332161; fetch one at api.openalex.org/funders/F4320332161 (the US National Institutes of Health).
About
Where funders come from
Funders are native entities: OpenAlex decides which real-world organizations count as distinct funders and mints an ID for each. The funder list is grounded in the Crossref Open Funder Registry — Crossref’s canonical list of research funders, each with a stable Funder DOI (e.g. 10.13039/100000002 for the NIH) — and enriched with names, homepages, logos, and country from Wikidata and ROR. Those registries are also where the external IDs in ids come from: the Crossref funder ID and DOI, plus ROR and Wikidata IDs where they exist.
How funders connect to works
OpenAlex doesn’t observe funding directly; it reads it off the works. When a work’s metadata (from Crossref, a funder’s own grant records, or other sources) names a funder or a grant, OpenAlex matches that mention to a funder in this list and to the specific award if one is identified. Roll-up counts live on the funder: works_count is how many works name this funder, awards_count is how many distinct grants OpenAlex has recorded for it, and cited_by_count sums citations across those works. See Awards for how individual grants are built.
Lineage and hierarchy
Unlike publishers and institutions, funders are flat in OpenAlex: a funder object carries no parent, no children, and no lineage field, so there’s no funder tree to roll a sub-agency up into its parent department the way you can roll an imprint up to its publishing group. (The underlying Crossref funder registry does record some parent/child relationships between funders, but OpenAlex does not currently surface them.) To connect a funder to the same organization in another role, use roles below.
Roles
A single real-world organization can act as more than one kind of OpenAlex entity: a national agency is a funder, but the same organization is often also an institution (when its own staff do research) and sometimes a publisher. roles links those alter egos together, so you can hop from the funder record to the institution or publisher record for the same organization.
Failure modes
Because funders are inferred and matched, they can be wrong: a funder mentioned only by a noisy free-text string may not match (so a work that was funded shows no funder), two records for one funder may not yet be merged, or a small funder may be absent from the source registries and so missing here. These are curatable.
Attributes
This is the canonical dictionary of every attribute on a funder object. Attributes shared with other entities (id, ids, display_name, works_count, cited_by_count, summary_stats, counts_by_year, created_date, updated_date) are documented once on Common attributes; funder-specific notes are below.
id
String. The OpenAlex ID for this funder, e.g. https://openalex.org/F4320332161. See Common attributes.
ids
Object. All known external identifiers for this funder, as URIs or bare values. Funder keys: openalex, ror, wikidata, crossref (the Crossref funder registry ID), and doi (the Funder DOI). See Common attributes.
display_name
String. The funder’s name, e.g. National Institutes of Health. See Common attributes. Filterable and searchable; not available as a group_by.
alternate_titles
List. Other names the funder is known by, including acronyms (NIH) and names in other languages.
description
String. A short description of the funder, usually pulled from Wikidata (e.g. “US government medical research agency”).
country_code
String. The ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code of the country the funder is based in. Unlike a publisher’s list, a funder has a single home country.
is_global_south
Boolean. Whether the funder is based in the Global South. Filterable and groupable — handy for equity analyses.
awards_count
Integer. The number of distinct awards (grants) OpenAlex has recorded for this funder.
homepage_url
String. The URL of the funder’s homepage.
image_url
String. A URL to the funder’s logo or a representative image (usually from Wikimedia Commons).
image_thumbnail_url
String. Like image_url, but scaled down for a thumbnail (a width parameter is appended).
works_count
Integer. The number of works that name this funder. See Common attributes.
cited_by_count
Integer. Total citations received across all works this funder funded. See Common attributes.
summary_stats
Object. Precomputed bibliometric indicators (2yr_mean_citedness, h_index, i10_index) over the funder’s works. See Common attributes.
counts_by_year
List. Works and citations per year for roughly the last ten years; funder rollups also carry oa_works_count per year. See Common attributes.
roles
List. The other OpenAlex entities that are the same real-world organization — each a { role, id, works_count } object where role is one of funder, institution, or publisher. See Roles. Filter on roles.id.
created_date
String. The date this funder was added to OpenAlex (YYYY-MM-DD). See Common attributes.
updated_date
String. The ISO 8601 UTC timestamp of the last change to this funder object. See Common attributes.
In the API
The Funders endpoint is at api.openalex.org/funders. Fetch a single funder by ID — /funders/F4320332161 — or a list, and filter, search, sort, group, and page over the fields above. To find the works a funder funded, filter works on funders.id; for the individual grants, see awards. For the full list of endpoints see the endpoints index.
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