You can now use the OpenAlex API to filter and group by continents and large geographic regions, such as the Global South. The full documentation is here.

To see a list of institutions in Europe you can do:

https://api.openalex.org/institutions?filter=continent:europe

So simple! You can group by continent as well. This will return a count of works where an author is associated with the institution’s continent:

https://api.openalex.org/works?group-by=institutions.continent

{
  "key": "Q46",
  "key_display_name": "Europe",
  "count": 26968686
},
{
  "key": "Q49",
  "key_display_name": "North America",
  "count": 25175848
},
{
  "key": "Q48",
  "key_display_name": "Asia",
  "count": 24805214
}...

The key field is the wikidata identifier for the continent, such as South America (Q18).

Querying the Global South

The Global South is a term used to identify regions within Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. We used data from the United Nations to build a list of countries associated with the Global South. It’s available as a boolean filter like:

https://api.openalex.org/institutions?filter=is_global_south:true

This allows for some very cool groupings, such as “show me authors associated with the Global South, grouped by country”:

https://api.openalex.org/authors?filter=last_known_institution.is_global_south:true&group-by=last_known_institution.country_code

New API Filters

We’ve added new filters for works:

• has_pmid – works that have a PubMed identifier
• has_pmcid – works that have a PubMed Central identifier
• repository – works that can be found at the given repository, based on venue ID
• version – works where the given version is available, such as acceptedVersion

Concepts Improvements

As requested by OpenAlex users, we modified the concepts tree so that it is a true hierarchy. This means when you search for works with the concept Computer Science, you’re also getting works tagged with those sub-concepts, such as Artificial Intelligence