Source-linked AI summary
OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts
Jason Priem, Heather Piwowar, Richard Orr
TL;DR
With Microsoft Academic Graph discontinued, scholarly metadata lacked an obvious replacement. OpenAlex addresses this gap with a fully open knowledge graph and distribution infrastructure, indexing about 209M works and offering free access through a GUI, data dump, and REST API.
Problem
Microsoft Academic Graph’s discontinuation created concern about replacing a widely used scientific knowledge graph.
Source: Introduction · p. 1Method
OpenAlex constructs a heterogeneous graph of scholarly entities, linking metadata through persistent identifiers, disambiguation, parsing, classification, and open distribution.
Source: Introduction · pp. 1–3Results
OpenAlex indexes about 209M works and provides free access through a data dump, REST API, and web-based GUI.
Source: Introduction · pp. 2–3Takeaways & Limitations
As a fully open scholarly metadata source, OpenAlex has potential to improve research evaluation, navigation, representation, and discovery.
Source: Introduction · p. 1
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
OpenAlex is a new, fully-open scientific knowledge graph (SKG), launched to replace the discontinued Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG). It contains metadata for 209M works (journal articles, books, etc); 2013M disambiguated authors; 124k venues (places that host works, such as journals and online repositories); 109k institutions; and 65k Wikidata concepts (linked to works via an automated hierarchical multi-tag classifier). The dataset is fully and freely available via a web-based GUI, a full data dump, and high-volume REST API. The resource is under active development and future work will improve accuracy and coverage of citation information and author/institution parsing and deduplication.
Introduction
OpenAlex was created as a fully open, drop-in replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph after its discontinuation, providing a scholarly knowledge graph with five entity types and broad free access. It indexes works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts while continuing to improve entity parsing, normalization, and disambiguation.
Motivation
- OpenAlex launched on January 1, 2022, as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph after Microsoft announced its discontinuation in May 2021.The project addressed concern that MAG would be difficult to replace with existing systems.Source: Introduction · p. 1
Contribution
- OpenAlex is fully open, offering open data, an open API, open-source code, and potential benefits for research evaluation, navigation, representation, and discovery.Its data are available through a full dump, REST API, and web-based GUI, all free and requiring no registration or permission.Source: Introduction · pp. 1, 3
Schema and IDs
- The OpenAlex graph contains five scholarly entity types: works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts.Entities are connected in a heterogeneous directed graph and assigned persistent OpenAlex IDs that can resolve to webpages or JSON objects.Source: Introduction · pp. 1–2
The OpenAlex entities
- 209M works, 213M authors, 124,000 venues, 109,000 institutions, and 65k concepts are indexed by OpenAlex.Works are added at about 50,000 daily, while authors are added at thousands daily.Source: Introduction · pp. 2–3
- OpenAlex assigns concepts through a hierarchical tree of about 65 thousand Wikidata-linked concepts, while authors and institutions are parsed and algorithmically disambiguated using available metadata.ORCID supports author disambiguation, and institution links are derived from parsed and normalized affiliation strings.Source: Introduction · pp. 2–3
Limitations and future work
- The young project still needs better entity parsing, normalization, and disambiguation, especially for authors and institutions, and currently lacks funding-source metadata.These improvements matter because the metadata may be used in high-stakes evaluation contexts.Source: Introduction · p. 4
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