Where to Get Support or Report a Bug for OpenAlex

OpenAlex offers four support routes, and which one you use depends on what you need. Ask other users in the Google Group for general questions and discussion, report a bug directly to the OpenAlex team, ask the documentation itself via an AI assistant, or start with the Help Center's own search and guides if you just need to find an answer. The Help Center also exposes machine-readable versions of its content (llms.txt and per-page .md files), which matter if you're feeding docs into an AI tool.

The four support channels

Ask other users in the Google Group

This is the channel for discussion rather than formal bug reports — useful when your question is "has anyone else hit this?" or when you want a human perspective on how to approach a task. The Help Center lists it under "Chat," framed as the option if you "prefer to talk it through."

Report a bug to the OpenAlex team

Use this when something is actually broken — an error you can't fix on your own end. The Help Center points to this as the route for reporting a bug to the team, distinct from the community discussion in the Google Group. Note that the Access section of the Help Center also covers "fixing errors," so check there first if your issue is a data error you might be able to correct or work around.

Ask the documentation with your AI

The Help Center explicitly supports this: "ask our docs with your AI," with Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity listed. Most of what you'd do with OpenAlex, an AI assistant can do for you. There's a free OpenAlex connector for Claude — the Help Center notes you don't need it, but it makes most things easier. A ChatGPT version is described as coming soon.

Search and self-serve guides

For a specific question, the Help Center says the fastest route is to search the full help center. If you're just starting, work through the five-minute Quickstart, browse the How-to guides for simple answers, or follow the Tutorials for longer, step-by-step recipes.

Machine-readable access to the docs

If you're wiring the documentation into an AI agent or tool, two things help:

• help.openalex.org/llms.txt — a plain-text index of every page in the Help Center.
• Per-page markdown — add .md to any page's URL to get a markdown version of it.

This is the practical path if you want an assistant to answer OpenAlex questions grounded in the actual docs rather than guessing.

Reference sections, if your question is about the data or API

Some questions aren't support requests at all — they're documentation lookups. The Help Center's reference material is split three ways:

• Access — getting the data, pricing, and fixing errors.
• Data — definitions and descriptions of what OpenAlex contains.
• API reference — documentation of the REST API.

If your "bug" turns out to be a misunderstanding of a field or endpoint, these sections are where to look before filing a report.