Evaluating the Linguistic Coverage of OpenAlex: An Assessment of Metadata Accuracy and Completeness

TL;DR

This study evaluates OpenAlex's metadata accuracy and completeness regarding language information, comparing it with WoS, revealing OpenAlex's broader linguistic coverage but also issues with metadata accuracy that affect language representation.

Contribution

It provides an assessment of OpenAlex's language metadata quality, highlighting its broader coverage and identifying areas for improvement compared to traditional databases.

Findings

OpenAlex has more balanced linguistic coverage than WoS.

Language metadata in OpenAlex is sometimes inaccurate.

OpenAlex tends to overestimate English and underestimate other languages.

Abstract

Clarivate's Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier's Scopus have been for decades the main sources of bibliometric information. Although highly curated, these closed, proprietary databases are largely biased towards English-language publications, underestimating the use of other languages in research dissemination. Launched in 2022, OpenAlex promised comprehensive, inclusive, and open-source research information. While already in use by scholars and research institutions, the quality of its metadata is currently being assessed. This paper contributes to this literature by assessing the completeness and accuracy of OpenAlex's metadata related to language, through a comparison with WoS, as well as an in-depth manual validation of a sample of 6,836 articles. Results show that OpenAlex exhibits a far more balanced linguistic coverage than WoS. However, language metadata is not always accurate, which leads OpenAlex to overestimate the place of English while underestimating that of other languages. If used critically, OpenAlex can provide comprehensive and representative analyses of languages used for scholarly publishing. However, more work is needed at infrastructural level to ensure the quality of metadata on language.