OpenAlex: Features, advantages and limitations of an open database for retrieving and analysing scholarly outputs

TL;DR

OpenAlex is an open scholarly database offering transparency and accessibility, but it faces challenges like incomplete metadata and consistency issues, requiring improvements for reliable research use.

Contribution

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of OpenAlex's features, advantages, limitations, and suggests strategies for enhancing data quality and usability.

Findings

Many records lack abstracts, affiliations, and references.

Issues with document type and language identification.

Needs for improved data cleaning and quality control.

Abstract

OpenAlex is an open bibliographic database that has been proposed as an alternative to commercial platforms in a context defined by the aim of transforming science evaluation systems into more transparent sources based on open data. This paper analyses its features, information sources, entities, advantages and limitations. The results reveal numerous records lacking abstracts, affiliations and references; deficiencies in identifying document types and languages; and issues with authority control and versioning. Although OpenAlex has been adopted in important initiatives and has yielded results comparable to those obtained with commercial databases, gaps in its metadata and a lack of consistency point to a need for intensive data cleaning, suggesting it should be used with caution. The study concludes by identifying three lines of action to improve data quality: increasing publishers' commitment to completing metadata in primary sources; creating coordination structures to channel the contributions of institutional users; and endowing the project with sufficient human resources and reliable procedures to address internal quality control tasks and user support requests.