The best way to search for publishers is to use the search query parameter, which searches the display_name and alternate_titles fields. Example:
- Search publishers'
display_nameandalternate_titlesfor "springer":
https://api.openalex.org/publishers?search=springer
{% hint style="info" %} You can read more about search here. It will show you how relevance score is calculated, how words are stemmed to improve search results, and how to do complex boolean searches. {% endhint %}
You can also use search as a filter, allowing you to fine-tune the fields you're searching over. To do this, you append .search to the end of the property you are filtering for:
- Get publishers with "elsevier" in the
display_name:
https://api.openalex.org/publishers?filter=display\_name.search:elsevier
The following field can be searched as a filter within publishers:
| Search filter | Field that is searched |
|---|---|
display_name.search |
display_name |
You can also use the filter default.search, which works the same as using the search parameter.
You can autocomplete publishers to create a very fast type-ahead style search function:
- Autocomplete publishers with "els" in the
display_name:
https://api.openalex.org/autocomplete/publishers?q=els
This returns a list of publishers:
{
"results": [
{
"id": "https://openalex.org/P4310320990",
"display_name": "Elsevier BV",
"hint": null,
"cited_by_count": 407508754,
"works_count": 20311868,
"entity_type": "publisher",
"external_id": "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q746413"
},
...
]
}
{% hint style="info" %} Read more in the autocomplete page in the API guide. {% endhint %}