Workshop Module
Hour 2 · Bibliometrics · Step 11 of 1573%
2.2

Getting the data

The real cost barrier.

~10 min

Scopus and Web of Science are the gold standard, but paid and institutionally gated. Several free alternatives are now credible.

Tools for this step

AI prompts (1)

Prompt

OpenAlex API query designer

When: You want to pull a clean dataset for bibliometric analysis.

Design an OpenAlex API query for a bibliometric study.

Topic: <PASTE>
Years: <e.g. 2015–2025>
Document types: <e.g. articles, reviews>
Language: <e.g. English>

Return:
1. A single OpenAlex /works URL with the right filters (search, from_publication_date, to_publication_date, type, language).
2. A second URL that returns just the count, so I can sanity-check the size before downloading.
3. A short Python snippet using `pyalex` (or requests with cursor pagination) that downloads all records into a CSV with: id, doi, title, authorships, publication_year, host_venue, cited_by_count, concepts, abstract_inverted_index.
4. Notes on rate limits and the "polite pool" email header.