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Each product carries its author list in authors, in the order in which they sign the product, and the total in authors_count. Some products have thousands of authors. That is why, as OpenAlex does, lists return only the first 100; the detail of a product returns all of them.

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How many authors each endpoint returns

The list limit also applies when fields are requested with fields. Patents and projects don’t have the 100 limit: their lists return all the authors, or the first 10 with view=summary.

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How to tell whether the list is cut

authors_count is always the real total number of authors of the product, in lists too. If it is greater than the number of items in authors, the list is cut. To show all the authors, use Product authors.
To show the rest in an interface, subtract the authors you display from the total. For example, with two names: “María Ejemplo García, Juan Ejemplo Pérez and 5,000 more authors”.

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Filters, sorting and counts

The cut is made last, after filtering, sorting and paginating. Filters, sorting and meta.count always take all the authors into account.
A product can appear among the products of an author or an affiliation even if that author is not among the first 100. In that case the author doesn’t appear in the list’s authors. Use Product authors to see them.

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Exports

CSV and Excel exports of products (of an affiliation, an author or a source) apply their own rule. If a product has more than 50 authors, only the authors with a Scienti identifier, that is, those registered in Colombia, are taken into account. With 50 authors or fewer, all of them are taken into account. The rule affects every column that comes from the authors: authors, institutions, faculties, departments, groups, groups_ranking and countries. In the authors column, names are in alphabetical order, not in signing order.

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Why

Only 0.2% of products have more than 100 authors, but those products hold more than half of all the author records in the database. The largest product has 5,002 authors: with all of them it weighs about 420 KB, and with the first 100, about 32 KB. Cutting the lists reduces the size of the responses and the load on the server without removing products from the results. For example, the first page of 10 products of a large institution went from 4.4 MB to 1.5 MB.
Filtering with authors_count=-100 is not equivalent: it excludes products with more than 100 authors from the results instead of cutting their list.