get-a-single-author.md

Get a single author

It's easy to get an author from from the API with: /authors/<entity_id>. Here's an example:

• Get the author with the OpenAlex ID A5023888391:
  https://api.openalex.org/authors/A5023888391

That will return an Author object, describing everything OpenAlex knows about the author with that ID:

{
    "id": "https://openalex.org/A5023888391",
    "orcid": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6187-6610",
    "display_name": "Jason Priem",
    "display_name_alternatives": [],
    "works_count": 53,
    // other fields removed for brevity
}

{% hint style="info" %} You can make up to 50 of these queries at once by requesting a list of entities and filtering on IDs using OR syntax. {% endhint %}

{% hint style="info" %} Authors are also available via an alias: /people {% endhint %}

External IDs

You can look up authors using external IDs such as an ORCID:

• Get the author with this ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1298-3089:
  https://api.openalex.org/authors/https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1298-3089

You can use the full ID or a shorter Uniform Resource Name (URN) format like so:
https://api.openalex.org/authors/orcid:0000-0002-1298-3089

Available external IDs for authors are:

External ID	URN
ORCID	orcid
Scopus	scopus
Twitter	twitter
Wikipedia	wikipedia

Select fields

You can use select to limit the fields that are returned in an author object. More details are here.

• Display only the id and display_name and orcid for an author object
  https://api.openalex.org/authors/A5023888391?select=id,display_name,orcid