OpenAlex
Let AI connect your sources for you
Skip the manual setup — run this in your project and the wizard auto-detects your databases and APIs and connects them to PostHog.
Connect OpenAlex to PostHog to sync your data into the PostHog data warehouse for analysis and modeling.
Enter your OpenAlex API key to pull scholarly metadata into the PostHog Data warehouse.
Keys are free and take about a minute to create at openalex.org/settings/api.
OpenAlex indexes over 300 million works and 120 million authors, which is more than a free key's daily allowance covers. Use the filter fields to narrow the works, authors and awards tables to the records you care about, for example authorships.institutions.lineage:i27837315 for one institution's papers. The filtering guide lists the available filter fields. Leave a filter blank to sync the whole entity.
Configuration
| Option | Type | Required |
|---|---|---|
API key | password | Yes |
Works filter (optional) | text | No |
Authors filter (optional) | text | No |
Awards filter (optional) | text | No |
Linking OpenAlex to PostHog
- Go to the Data pipeline page in PostHog
- Click New source and select OpenAlex
- Fill in the required configuration fields
- Click Next, select the tables you want to sync, and then press Import
Supported tables
| Table | Description | Sync method | Incremental field | Primary key |
|---|---|---|---|---|
works | Scholarly documents indexed by OpenAlex: journal articles, books, datasets, preprints and theses. | Incremental, Full refresh | publication_date | — |
authors | People who create scholarly works, disambiguated by OpenAlex into one record per person. | Full refresh | — | — |
awards | Grants and other research awards, linked to their funder and to the works they produced. | Full refresh | — | — |
sources | Journals, conferences, book series and repositories that host works. | Full refresh | — | — |
institutions | Universities and other organizations that authors are affiliated with. | Full refresh | — | — |
publishers | Companies and organizations that publish journals, books and other sources. | Full refresh | — | — |
funders | Organizations that fund research, linked to the works and awards they support. | Full refresh | — | — |
topics | Roughly 4,500 research topics that works, authors and sources are classified into. | Full refresh | — | — |
keywords | Free-text keywords assigned to works, with usage and citation counts. | Full refresh | — | — |
domains | Top level of the topic hierarchy: four broad areas of research. | Full refresh | — | — |
fields | Second level of the topic hierarchy: 26 fields, each belonging to a domain. | Full refresh | — | — |
subfields | Third level of the topic hierarchy: 252 subfields, each belonging to a field. | Full refresh | — | — |
sdgs | The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals that works are tagged against. | Full refresh | — | — |
countries | Countries used in institution and authorship records, with their research output counts. | Full refresh | — | — |
continents | The seven continents countries are grouped into. | Full refresh | — | — |
languages | Languages works are written in, with their work and citation counts. | Full refresh | — | — |
work_types | Types a work can be classified as, such as article, book-chapter or dataset. | Full refresh | — | — |
source_types | Types a source can be classified as, such as journal, repository or conference. | Full refresh | — | — |
institution_types | Types an institution can be classified as, such as education, company or government. | Full refresh | — | — |
licenses | Licenses that open access copies of works are published under. | Full refresh | — | — |