OpenAlex

2025-01-13 15:58

OpenAlex is an open database of scientific literature. The name was given in honor of the Library of Alexandria, one of the largest libraries of antiquity. This resource contains more than 250 million records of scientific works from 230 thousand sources.

Initially, Open Alex was based on the data from Microsoft Academic Graph. This open search platform for scientific materials collected the information as well as provided its visualization. That distinguished it from Google Scholar.

Today, Open Alex has become an aggregator of scientific literature from numerous open databases: the resource accumulates metadata from CrossRef, Pubmed, arXiv, Zenodo, and the information about full-text articles in public domain from UnPaywall.

How does OpenAlex work?

This resource has to sacrifice selectivity for the sake of broad coverage (so does Google Scholar).

Only recently has OpenAlex got a user-friendly interface with the ability to search in human language. Previously, to get the information you had to be able to program in Python and R.

You can register on the platform, although this is not compulsory.

In the database, you can find the following types of scientific information:

1) Articles, preprints, dissertations, books and other scientific works.

Besides the general information about papers, you can find the cross-citation web. Works published recently are also emphasized..

The information is provided on:

title and DOI;
databases where the paper has been indexed;
authors, their affiliations and identifiers;
language, date and year of publication, type of work, access status;
publisher;
bibliographic description;
number of citations by year;
list of works citing this article;
keywords.

2) Authors:

name spelling variations;identifiers (OpenAlex, Scopus, ORCID, etc.)affiliations;total number of articles and their citations;number of articles and their citations by year;Impact Factor, H-index, i-10 index;list of scientific works;keywords related to the author's works.

3) Journals:

abbreviated name and / or variations;
OpenAlex identifier, ISSN-L or ISSN;
country of publication;
submission cost (taken from DOAJ);
total number of citations;
: the number of works published and the number of citations over the past 10 years ;
start page;
list of all scientific works published;
Journal Impact Factor, H-index and i-10 index;
field-related topic;
access type.

4) Institutions:

name variations, including when in different languages;
OpenAlex identifier and all the external identifiers known;
country, region, city;
related institutions and type of connection;
URL of the home page;
number of citations of the related scientific works by year;
list of all papers related;
Impact Factor, H-index, i-10 index;
most recurrent terms and topics related to this institution.

4) Topics assigned to scientific works. They have four levels of hierarchy: topic, subsection, area, and domain.

For example:
Topic — artificial intelligence in medicine
Subfield — medical informatics
Field— medicine
Domain — health sciences

5) Publishers:

main title and title variations, including when in different languages;
OpenAlex identifier and all the external identifiers known;
country;
list of all resources published;
total number of scientific works and their citations by year;
Impact Factor, H-index, i-10 index;

6) Information about sponsors from Crossref, Wikidata and ROR:

title variations;
short description;
country;
OpenAlex identifier and all the external identifiers known (Crossref, DOI, ROR);
URL of the homepage;
number of grants;
number of papers sponsored and their citations by year;
number of papers citing the sponsored work;
Impact Factor, H-index, i-10 index.

You can filter the information traced to sort it by the continent and the country.

Advantages and disadvantages of OpenAlex:

You can make up to 100,000 queries per day free of charge. OpenAlex Premium allows an unlimited number of queries.
You can download and distribute all the data obtained.
The coverage of sources is much wider than in Scopus and Web of Science, however, the selection is less rigid.