Aria, Le, Cuccurullo, Belfiore and Choe position openalexR as a methodological bridge between open scholarly metadata and reproducible bibliometric analysis. The article begins from a decisive premise: bibliographic databases are indispensable for research assessment and science mapping, yet their utility depends on coverage, citation completeness, update speed, API accessibility and permissive terms of use. OpenAlex, launched in 2022 as a fully open catalogue of scholarly metadata, is therefore presented as a crucial alternative to commercial infrastructures such as Web of Science and Scopus. The paper’s case synthesis lies in the R package itself: openalexR simplifies interaction with the OpenAlex REST API by generating valid queries, downloading matching entities and converting nested outputs into classical bibliographic data frames usable in bibliometrix. The diagram on page 2 shows OpenAlex’s eight interconnected entities—works, authors, institutions, sources, concepts, publishers, funders and geo—while the workflow on page 3 clarifies how openalexR moves from API query to analysable data. Its examples on bibliometrics demonstrate concept retrieval, source ranking, author and institutional profiling, citation-based identification of seminal works, snowball searching and N-gram extraction; the visualisations on pages 7–11 illustrate trends, journal expansion, citation networks and thematic bigrams. The conclusion is that openalexR transforms open research information into executable analytical practice, lowering technical barriers while advancing transparency, reproducibility and non-proprietary bibliometric inquiry.