Overview of advantages, disavantages, search techniques and features of the database.

What is OpenAlex?

OpenAlex is a free and open database of scholarly publications, researchers, institutions and funders. A nonprofit organisation builds and runs it to make scholarly communication more accessible and transparent. 

OpenAlex indexes over 320M scholarly works from 250k sources. It focuses on broad coverage of research from underrepresented regions, such as the Global South, and non-English languages. It also offers access to its source code and underlying data.  

As OpenAlex is one of the largest freely available bibliographic databases, it is worthwhile to explore what it offers compared to commercial databases such as Scopus. After your (study) time at WUR, you can keep using it to stay up to date with scientific developments in your field.

How does OpenAlex work?

OpenAlex harvests metadata from thousands of institutional and subject repositories. It uses PIDs (Persistent Identifiers) to aggregate data from different open sources.

Key contributors are:

• Crossref: Ensures reliable metadata by assigning DOIs to a wide range of academic publications.
• MAG (Microsoft Academic Graph): A foundational dataset that continues to underpin OpenAlex after Microsoft's discontinuation of the project in 2021.

Some other sources are ORCID, ROR, DOAJ, Unpaywall, PubMed, PubMed Central, The ISSN International Centre, and Internet Archive.

Currently, OpenAlex contains 22 entity types, of which a few are highlighted below:

• Works - journal articles, books, book chapters, datasets, conference proceedings, preprints, and theses/dissertations
• Authors - people who create works
• Sources - such as journals, conferences, and repositories
• Institutions - Universities and other organisations of which authors claim affiliations
• Topics - Topics assigned to works
• Publishers: Companies and organisations that distribute works
• Funders: Organisations that fund research
• Geography: Locations and languages

Advantages of OpenAlex

OpenAlex offers several benefits compared to subscription-based databases:

• All data behind OpenAlex is freely and openly available under a CC0 license, which means that anybody can use and reuse the data. Be aware that this only applies to the metadata (i.e. the title of a work, the year in which it is published, etc.). OpenAlex also contains metadata about articles published in subscription-based journals, of which the full text is not openly available.
• The data are openly accessible through an API. This enables researchers to use the full dataset for free, in contrast to APIs that are licenced by proprietary databases. Searching for literature via the API is more extensive than via the interface. 
• It offers a wider range of publication types than most commercial databases, including dissertations, preprints, books, datasets, policy documents and grey literature. The number of publications indexed in OpenAlex is about five times higher than in Web of Science or Scopus.
• OpenAlex actively includes research from underrepresented regions, including the Global South. It also indexes publications in languages other than English.
• OpenAlex assigns detailed topics to individual publications, rather than classifying them based on the journal in which an article appeared, as is done in Scopus and Web of Science.

Limitations of OpenAlex

OpenAlex also has shortcomings:

• The quality of the metadata. Particularly, metadata such as institutional affiliations or author disambiguation can be compromised compared to metadata from databases such as Scopus or Web of Science. Document classification is compromised too. This can affect the accuracy of bibliometric analyses.
• OpenAlex includes data from journals with questionable practices. However, the platform allows you to filter data based on trusted lists, such as the DOAJ, helping you focus on reliable publications.
• OpenAlex offers full-text search for Open Access works, which may return a lot of irrelevant literature if you search in the full text. However, it is possible to search in Title & Abstract only. 
• Systematic searching is not possible at the level of a systematic search in Scopus or Web of Science via the interface. Its Boolean search functionality is less sophisticated. You cannot use wildcards or proximity searching, and there is no controlled vocabulary such as in PubMed. If you use the API, a more extended search functionality is available. 

Library advice for using OpenAlex

OpenAlex is an excellent database to get a broad overview of literature on a certain topic. You can use OpenAlex to search for information when orienting yourself on your topic, the same way you would use Google Scholar or WUR Library Search. The fact that full text is available for many publications is an advantage when you want to do a quick read of the record.

When you are mainly looking for ‘grey’ literature (non-scientific publications) or scientific publications in other languages than English, OpenAlex can be a good source too.

For systematic literature searches, however, OpenAlex is currently not that suitable. It is not yet possible to search in fields other than Title,  Abstract, and Full text, or use wildcards and proximity searching if you use the interface. It doesn’t automatically store your search history, which is needed to easily combine concepts or keywords. For systematic searches, you are advised to use Scopus (multidisciplinary) or any of the disciplinary databases that WUR Library provides access to.

Searching in OpenAlex

You can use the search box on the homepage openalex.org. To search only for publications, go to openalex.org/works.   

• All research output (articles, books, preprints, etc.) indexed in OpenAlex are called works.
• It is advisable to make a personal account before using OpenAlex. This lets you save searches, set up alerts, and keep an eye on your exports.
• You can search for works, authors, institutions, or other entities. Searching for Wageningen University & Research brings up over 125,000 works, which you can narrow down by publication year, document type, topic, and more. You can do a Boolean search (AND, OR, NOT) or run a semantic, AI-powered search, which is still in beta.

• To search for phrase combinations, use double quotes (“remote sensing”).
• Export options: You can download the search results in various formats (.csv, .ris, .txt) for offline analysis or further use.
• Custom alerts: Set up alerts to receive notifications when new works matching your search criteria are added to the database.

Filter results

OpenAlex offers search and filtering tools comparable to other databases. You can filter on, for example, region, publication type, time frame, institution, etc. This helps you focus on specific geographical areas or institutions, particular publication types (e.g., theses, policy documents) or research from a specific time period. The selected filters are shown left of the results and can easily be adjusted.

Stemming and wildcards

Using wildcards to truncate words is not possible if you use the interface: OpenAlex uses stemming. This means that when you search for investment, your search will automatically return investments, but also invest and investing. You can disable this if you want. If you use the API, you can use wildcards. 

API

In addition to searching through the user interface as described above, you can also use OpenAlex's API. This especially comes in handy when using scripts/code to retrieve results in an automated way. The API offers wider functionality than the interface and is described extensively on their website.

Full database download (Snapshot)

For large-scale offline analysis, you can download the entire OpenAlex database in one go. The complete OpenAlex database is available in two formats: gzip-compressed JSON Lines and Apache Parquet. The free public snapshot is updated quarterly; paid plans get daily-refreshed snapshots and daily change files.

Support

OpenAlex offers extensive support,  technical documentation, how-to guides and ready-to-use libraries (e.g., for Python and R). Webinars and tutorials are also available. If you have any questions on how to use OpenAlex, please contact the Library.