# Counting

Recipes for counting things in OpenAlex. For building the result set you're counting, see [Searching](/how-to/searching/); for the full querying story, start with [Querying](/access/querying/).

> [!claude]
> You can count and group in plain language: *"How many works on X per year since 2015?"* or *"Which journals carry the most papers on Y?"* Each answer includes the exact query it ran. Set up once: [Using OpenAlex with an AI assistant](/how-to/ai-assistants/). (Totals of citations across a result set are website-only for now.)

## How do I count all the citations to a set of results?

For any result set — whatever searches and filters you've applied — add the **citations sum** facet under **Stats** (click **"+"** next to *Stats* → *citations sum*). It shows the total citations received by every work in the set. Divide by the number of results for the average citations per work.

## How do I check whether a journal's works are in OpenAlex?

Search for the journal by name and click it — that filters to works whose primary location is that journal, so you can browse its coverage. If the name doesn't turn it up, search by [ISSN](/data/sources/attributes/#issn) instead. Still nothing? [Get in touch](https://openalex.org/contact).

## Why do the counts-by-year numbers differ from what I see in the interface?

The `counts_by_year`, `works_count`, and `cited_by_count` numbers nested inside an entity (an author, institution, or source) are **precomputed**. They are refreshed regularly, so they trail a live works query only slightly (typically well under 1%). When the gap is bigger, it usually comes from one of these:

- **Institutions and publishers count only themselves.** An institution's `works_count` counts works tagged with that institution, not its units (labs, hospitals, merged predecessor records); a publisher's counts its own sources, not its imprints'. The website's works list for an institution or publisher includes those units, because it filters on `lineage` (`authorships.institutions.lineage`, `primary_location.source.host_organization_lineage`).
- **Entity counts include the expansion corpus.** `works_count` counts works in both corpora, while a works query counts only the core corpus unless you add [`corpus=all`](/data/works/corpus/).
- **Topics count primary topics.** A topic's `works_count` counts works whose primary topic it is; filtering on `topics.id` also matches secondary topics.
- **Sources count primary locations.** A source's `works_count` counts works whose primary location is that source.

If you need an exact count, run a works search filtered by the entity (e.g. `openalex.org/works?filter=authorships.author.id:A5086928770`) instead of reading the nested number. Full explanation: [Counts by year](/data/common-attributes/#counts_by_year).