MLA International Bibliography vs OpenAlex
MLA International Bibliography
mla.orgOpenAlex
openalex.orgSide by side
| Figure | MLA International Bibliography | OpenAlex |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | $1/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 9 |
| Spec score · Academic Research Databases | 7.2 (#26) | 8.9 (#2) |
| Integrations | MLA BibLink lets researchers search the bibliography for their works and add them to an ORCID profile with one click. | Website exports support CSV, RIS for EndNote or Zotero, and TXT, while VOSviewer connects directly through the API. |
| Support | The MLA directs questions about the bibliography to its staff at [email protected]. | Member includes community support, Member+ includes ticket-based help for critical API bugs, and Partner includes full ticket-based support for API and data issues. |
| What it does | The bibliography directs researchers to citations for journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations, scholarly websites, editions, and translations published from the late 19th century to the present. | OpenAlex is an open index and knowledge graph covering scholarly works, authors, sources, institutions, topics and related entities. |
Plans
MLA International Bibliography
- MLA International BibliographyPriced on request
OpenAlex
- Pay as you go$1 a month
- Member$5,000 a year
- Member+$10,000 a year
- Partner$20,000 a year
- FreeFree
- Pay as you go$1, paid once
- Member$5,000 a year
- Member+$10,000 a year
- Partner$20,000 a year
In their own words
MLA International Bibliography
MLA International Bibliography has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
OpenAlex
OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of scholarly research, with a REST API for querying connected records such as works, authors, sources, institutions, and topics. API users can search, filter, sort, group, page through results, select fields, and retrieve individual entities. The complete database snapshot can be downloaded from Amazon S3 without an AWS account, and the data is released under the CC0 public-domain license. An official command-line tool supports bulk downloads with parallel transfers, checkpoints, rate limiting, retries, and resume. Full-text access provides PDFs and machine-readable TEI XML; each file download costs $0.01. Website exports include CSV, RIS, and TXT, while VOSviewer connects through the API. OpenAlex also offers Unpaywall's legacy-format open-access API, including a browser extension and integrations with SFX, EBSCO Discovery Service, and 360 Link. Its coverage includes journal articles, conference papers, books, chapters, datasets, dissertations, and preprints. OpenAlex is operated by a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and its code is open source.