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The /authors endpoint gives you access to enriched researcher profiles aggregated from OpenAlex and other sources. Each profile bundles citation metrics, total publication counts, ORCID identifiers, and a full institutional affiliation history into a single record — everything you need to build researcher directories, co-authorship graphs, or bibliometric dashboards without stitching together multiple upstream sources yourself.

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Search for Authors

Use the search query parameter to find authors by name. Results are ranked by relevance and include basic metrics so you can identify the right researcher at a glance. 
curl "https://hexagraph-core.onrender.com/authors?search=feynman"
Example response 
{
  "results": [
    {
      "id": "OA:A2048391207",
      "name": "Richard P. Feynman",
      "citations": 89402,
      "outputs": 317
    },
    {
      "id": "OA:A3109847201",
      "name": "Michelle Feynman",
      "citations": 143,
      "outputs": 12
    }
  ],
  "meta": {
    "total": 2,
    "page": 1,
    "per_page": 25
  }
}
Each result includes the author’s Hexagraph id, display name, total citations received across all works, and a count of indexed outputs.

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Fetch Author by ID

When you have a specific author’s OA:ID, retrieve their complete profile with GET /authors/{id}. 
curl "https://hexagraph-core.onrender.com/authors/OA:A5086208034"
Example response 
{
  "id": "OA:A5086208034",
  "orcid": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097",
  "name": "Jordan Rivera",
  "citations": 6201,
  "outputs": 84,
  "affiliations": [
    {
      "institution": {
        "id": "OA:I136199984",
        "name": "Massachusetts Institute of Technology"
      }
    },
    {
      "institution": {
        "id": "OA:I97018004",
        "name": "Stanford University"
      }
    }
  ]
}
The full profile response adds the orcid field and expands the affiliations array with structured institution objects containing both an id and a human-readable name.

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Working with ORCID

When available, the orcid field contains the author’s fully qualified ORCID URI (e.g. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097). ORCID is a persistent, researcher-controlled identifier that remains stable across institutional changes and name variations. You can use the ORCID value to cross-reference Hexagraph records with other scholarly systems — for example, looking up a researcher’s full ORCID profile, querying the Crossref API, or linking records in your own database. Not all authors have a verified ORCID; when one is unavailable the field is returned as null.

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Author Affiliations

The affiliations array documents every institution associated with the author’s indexed works. Each entry in the array is an object containing a single institution key, which itself carries:
FieldTypeDescription
idstringThe institution’s Hexagraph OA:ID (OA:I prefix)
namestringThe institution’s display name
Affiliations are derived from the author’s published works and reflect the institutions listed on those papers. An author who has moved between institutions over their career will typically appear with multiple affiliation entries.

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Via GraphQL

You can retrieve the same full profile through Hexagraph’s GraphQL endpoint, with the added benefit of specifying exactly which fields you need: 
query GetAuthorProfile {
  author(id: "OA:A5086208034") {
    id
    orcid
    name
    citations
    outputs
    affiliations {
      institution {
        name
      }
    }
  }
}
Send this as a POST request to https://hexagraph-core.onrender.com/graphql, or paste it directly into the interactive GraphQL playground. See the GraphQL Queries guide for more details on batching author and output lookups in a single request.
Author data is sourced from OpenAlex’s disambiguated author profiles. An author may have multiple works attributed to them across different affiliated institutions. In rare cases where disambiguation is uncertain, two distinct author records may exist for the same real-world researcher — use the orcid field as the authoritative cross-reference when precision matters.