get-a-single-concept.md

Get a single concept

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

• Get the concept with the OpenAlex ID C71924100:
  https://api.openalex.org/concepts/C71924100

That will return a Concept object, describing everything OpenAlex knows about the concept with that ID:

{
    "id": "https://openalex.org/C71924100",
    "wikidata": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11190",
    "display_name": "Medicine",
    "level": 0,
    "description": "field of study for diagnosing, treating and preventing disease",
    // 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 %}

External IDs

You can look up concepts using external IDs such as a wikidata ID:

• Get the concept with wikidata ID Q11190:
  https://api.openalex.org/concepts/wikidata:Q11190

Available external IDs for concepts are:

External ID	URN
Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG)	mag
Wikidata	wikidata

Select fields

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

• Display only the id and display_name for a concept object
  https://api.openalex.org/concepts/C71924100?select=id,display_name