Our World in Data
Our World in Data is a publication that presents research and data on global problems as charts, built on data from many original providers. Through ScholarMuse, an agent can search those charts with find_series and use get_series to download the data behind one chart for a country, the world or the EU, along with the citation of the underlying source.
ScholarMuse tools: find_series, get_series. Each successful call uses credits.
Ask your agent
What your agent gets back
Every record carries id, source, title, url, license, attribution and retrievedAt. The fields below are the data that comes from Our World in Data.
find_series
Candidates are charts from Our World in Data's own search, so frequency and units are not known at this step.
- seriesId
- e.g. owid:life-expectancy?country=JPN
- title
- Chart title, with variant name if any
- geography
- Country named in the query, if any
- description
- Chart subtitle, first 400 characters
- updated
- Date the chart was last updated
get_series
otherColumns is present only when the chart has more than one data column; add &column=<name> to the seriesId to pick another.
- seriesId
- Chart slug with country and, if needed, column
- title
- Chart title, plus column title if several
- units
- Unit of the chosen column
- frequency
- Annual or Daily
- geography
- Entity name as written by Our World in Data
- description
- Short description of the column
- citation
- Citation of the underlying data source
- lastUpdated
- When the column's data was last updated
- otherColumns
- Up to 10 other data columns in the chart
- count
- Number of observations returned
- observations
- List of date and value pairs
What it covers
- Charts published under ourworldindata.org/grapher. A series id is the chart slug, for example owid:life-expectancy.
- Geography is one country by ISO code, the World, or the EU27. Without a country, the World series is returned.
- Most charts are yearly; charts with a day or date column are returned as daily series.
Limits
- Our World in Data republishes other organisations' data. The CC BY licence covers its own work only; cite the source in the citation field and check that source's terms.
- One country and one data column per call. When a chart has several columns, the first is used unless you name another.
- Only charts are searched. Articles, topic pages and explorer views are filtered out.
- Continents and income groups other than the World and the EU27 are not mapped. Each download may take up to 45 seconds.
How ScholarMuse reaches Our World in Data
The connector calls ourworldindata.org directly and sends no key. find_series uses the site's search API limited to charts; get_series downloads the chart's .metadata.json and .csv files from /grapher/<slug> and keeps the rows for the requested country.
Chart data and metadata are cached for up to 1 day and search results for 12 hours.
API key: the upstream API can be called without one, so you do not add one.
Licence and attribution
Licence: CC-BY-4.0 (OWID’s own work; third-party data keeps its original licence)
Our World in Data (ourworldindata.org), CC BY. Cite the underlying sources listed in data.citation.
Records that come from Our World in Data carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow Our World in Data's own citation guidance.
