When visiting openalex.org, you will be presented with a search box on an otherwise blank page.
Depending on the search terms you enter in the search box, OpenAlex will suggest the best filter options.
While you can search directly from this page, we recommend using the more user-friendly interface available through openalex.org/works, which you also reach when simply pressing Enter in the search box on the home page.
This will lead you to a page similar to the image below:
All research output (articles, books, preprints, etc.) indexed in OpenAlex are called works.
You can filter results by clicking the round blue button with the + (a little below the top left).
There, you first select the field you want to filter on, for example title/abstract, corresponding institution, year published or open access status.
After selecting the field, for example title&abstract, you can enter the search terms you want to filter upon.
Within one filter line, you can use the boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT). You can also add multiple filters. The results satisfy all filters, i.e. filter lines are combined using an AND.
To search for literal combinations of words in a specific order, you can encapsulate your word combination in double quotes (e.g. "systematic review").
OpenAlex automatically performs stemming on the results, which means that if you search for protein, it will automatically also include proteins and other word variations. It is not possible yet to disable this via the regular search interface, but it is possible when using the API. It is also not possible to perform manual truncation (i.e. use child* to search for child, children, and childlike), OpenAlex does this automatically for you.
OpenAlex can be used to do citation searching. When viewing a single work, you can click on the number behind cites to view all works cited by that work or click on the number behind cited by to view all future works citing that work.
Next to searching through the user interface as described above, you can also use OpenAlex' API. This especially comes in handy when using scripts/code to retrieve results in an automated way. The API is described extensively on their website.