Work Types Overview

All work type values in OpenAlex

Work types classify the form of a scholarly document. Each work has exactly one type.

Values

ID	Display name
article	article
book	book
book-chapter	book-chapter
dataset	dataset
dissertation	dissertation
editorial	editorial
erratum	erratum
letter	letter
libguides	libguides
other	other
paratext	paratext
peer-review	peer-review
preprint	preprint
reference-entry	reference-entry
report	report
retraction	retraction
review	review
standard	standard
supplementary-materials	supplementary-materials

Use these values with the type filter on works: filter=type:article

How types are assigned

Every work gets exactly one type. OpenAlex assigns it by mapping the type reported by the work’s source — Crossref’s type, DataCite’s resourceType, PubMed’s publication type, etc. — onto the OpenAlex vocabulary above, then applying a set of internal heuristics (for example, titles like “Index”, “Cover Picture”, or a bare journal name are classified as paratext). Approved curations can override the assigned type for an individual work.

Paratext

paratext covers material that is part of a publication but not the scholarly content itself — front matter, back matter, indexes, covers, mastheads, and advertisements. Filter for it with filter=type:paratext.

The separate boolean field is_paratext is deprecated. It is now derived directly from type (it is true exactly when type is paratext) and carries no additional information. Use filter=type:paratext instead of filter=is_paratext:true. is_paratext remains available for backward compatibility but may be removed in a future release.