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This guide walks you through your first REST and GraphQL requests against the Hexagraph API. No authentication is required — you can start querying live scholarly metadata immediately. By the end of this guide you’ll have fetched a scholarly output by ID, run a filtered search, and executed a GraphQL query from the playground.
1

Check the API

Before making data requests, confirm the Hexagraph service is up and reachable by calling the health endpoint.
curl https://hexagraph-core.onrender.com/health
A healthy service returns:
{
  "status": "ok"
}
If you receive a non-200 response or a network error, the service may be temporarily unavailable. Try again after a few moments.
2

Fetch a scholarly output

Retrieve a single scholarly work by its OA:ID. Hexagraph uses the OA: prefix for all entity identifiers, derived from the underlying OpenAlex identifier.
curl https://hexagraph-core.onrender.com/outputs/OA:W2107277218
Example response (trimmed):
{
  "id": "OA:W2107277218",
  "doi": "https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12373",
  "title": "Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning",
  "year": 2015,
  "citations": 18423,
  "authors": [
    { "id": "OA:A5086208034", "name": "Volodymyr Mnih" },
    { "id": "OA:A5010412141", "name": "Koray Kavukcuoglu" },
    { "id": "OA:A5025753558", "name": "David Silver" }
  ]
}
Use the id values returned in the authors array to resolve individual author records via the /authors/{id} endpoint.
3

Search publications

Use the /outputs endpoint with query parameters to search across millions of scholarly works. Combine search with filter to narrow results, and use page and per_page for pagination.
curl "https://hexagraph-core.onrender.com/outputs?search=artificial+intelligence&filter=has_doi:true&page=1&per_page=3"
Key query parameters:
ParameterTypeDescription
searchstringFull-text search term across titles and abstracts
filterstringComma-separated filter expressions (e.g. has_doi:true)
pageintegerPage number for paginated results (default: 1)
per_pageintegerNumber of results per page (default: 10, max: 50)
The response includes a meta object with total result counts and pagination details alongside the results array.
4

Try GraphQL

Hexagraph exposes a full GraphQL API for flexible, nested queries. The interactive playground is available at:https://hexagraph-core.onrender.com/graphqlPaste the following query into the playground to retrieve the same scholarly output you fetched in Step 2:
query GetScholarlyOutput {
  output(id: "OA:W2107277218") {
    id
    doi
    title
    year
    date
    citations
    authors {
      name
    }
  }
}
GraphQL lets you request exactly the fields you need — no more, no less — and compose nested queries across related entities (e.g. fetching an author’s affiliated institutions in the same request). See the GraphQL Overview for the full schema reference.
Hexagraph enforces rate limits of 30 requests per minute and 1,000 requests per day per IP address. If you exceed these limits, you’ll receive an HTTP 429 Too Many Requests response. See Rate Limits & Authentication for guidance on handling limit errors gracefully.

API Reference

Explore the full REST endpoint catalog, parameters, and response schemas.

Rate Limits

Understand how rate limiting works and how to avoid hitting your quota.