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Hauptverfasser: Borrego, Ángel, Urbano, Cristóbal
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16434
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author Borrego, Ángel
Urbano, Cristóbal
author_facet Borrego, Ángel
Urbano, Cristóbal
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_16434
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OpenAlex: Features, advantages and limitations of an open database for retrieving and analysing scholarly outputs
Borrego, Ángel
Urbano, Cristóbal
Digital Libraries
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.
title OpenAlex: Features, advantages and limitations of an open database for retrieving and analysing scholarly outputs
topic Digital Libraries
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16434