get-a-single-source.md

Get a single source

It's easy to get a source from from the API with: /sources/<entity_id>. Here's an example:

• Get the source with the OpenAlex ID S137773608:
  https://api.openalex.org/sources/S137773608

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

{
    "id": "https://openalex.org/S137773608",
    "issn_l": "0028-0836",
    "issn": [
        "1476-4687",
        "0028-0836"
    ],
    "display_name": "Nature",
    // 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" %} Sources are also available via an alias: /journals {% endhint %}

External IDs

You can look up journals using external IDs such as an ISSN:

• Get the source with ISSN: 2041-1723:
  https://api.openalex.org/sources/issn:2041-1723

Available external IDs for sources are:

External ID	URN
ISSN	issn
Fatcat	fatcat
Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG)	mag
Wikidata	wikidata

Select fields

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

• Display only the id and display_name for a source object
  https://api.openalex.org/sources/S137773608?select=id,display_name