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An analysis of the suitability of OpenAlex for bibliometric analyses

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arxiv 2404.17663 v1 pith:V6PPNQXJ submitted 2024-04-26 cs.DL

Juan Pablo Alperin , Jason Portenoy , Kyle Demes , Vincent Larivière , Stefanie Haustein This is my paper · ORCID
classification cs.DL
keywords openalexanalysesdatabasessciencescopusacrossanalysislimitations
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Scopus and the Web of Science have been the foundation for research in the science of science even though these traditional databases systematically underrepresent certain disciplines and world regions. In response, new inclusive databases, notably OpenAlex, have emerged. While many studies have begun using OpenAlex as a data source, few critically assess its limitations. This study, conducted in collaboration with the OpenAlex team, addresses this gap by comparing OpenAlex to Scopus across a number of dimensions. The analysis concludes that OpenAlex is a superset of Scopus and can be a reliable alternative for some analyses, particularly at the country level. Despite this, issues of metadata accuracy and completeness show that additional research is needed to fully comprehend and address OpenAlex's limitations. Doing so will be necessary to confidently use OpenAlex across a wider set of analyses, including those that are not at all possible with more constrained databases.

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Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 16 citations worldwide. Full citation record

  1. Return of the solo author: The changing division of labor in science in the age of generative AI

    cs.CY 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Across 300M+ OpenAlex works, the long decline in solo authorship halted and partially reversed after ChatGPT’s release, strongest where coauthor tasks are more replaceable and among authors who previously only coauthored.

  2. A Graph Approach to the Academic Publishing Network: A Heterogeneous Model and Structural Screening over OpenAlex Open Data

    cs.SI 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A reproducible OpenAlex graph pipeline shows that broad disciplinary scope, not citation insularity, is the robust structural signal of problematic venues, and that PageRank-based journal prestige is about ten times m...

  3. Citation Parsing and Analysis with Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Open-weight language models, including a 0.6B-parameter model, reach higher field-level citation-parsing accuracy than GROBID and Crossref search, with the small model succeeding within 64 sampled attempts.

  4. Analysing the coverage of the University of Bologna's bibliographic and citation metadata in OpenCitations collections

    cs.DL 2025-01 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    About 36% of the 402,505 records in the University of Bologna's IRIS system could be matched into OpenCitations, but citations per record there (35.3) are close to Scopus (36.0) and Web of Science (34.7).

  5. Mapping scientific communities at scale

    cs.DL 2025-01 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    An open-source pipeline maps millions of French publications into interactive community networks by pre-filtering the strongest co-occurrence links and labeling clusters with an LLM.

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