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Trustworthiness of OpenAlex scholarly metadata

Determine the trustworthiness of OpenAlex’s scholarly metadata, specifically assessing how reliable its reference and core metadata coverage are when compared to the proprietary databases Web of Science and Scopus, in order to clarify whether OpenAlex can serve as a dependable basis for bibliometric analyses.

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Background

OpenAlex is an openly available and rapidly evolving bibliometric data source intended to replace Microsoft Academic Graph. Because its contents and metadata are expanding and changing quickly, concerns have been raised about the reliability of its data for research evaluation and bibliometric studies.

The paper positions its comparative analysis of reference and metadata coverage across OpenAlex, Web of Science, and Scopus as contributing evidence to address a broader open question in bibliometrics regarding the trustworthiness of OpenAlex’s data, highlighting the need for independent validation and comparison against established proprietary databases.

References

However, as OpenAlex is a rapidly evolving source and the data contained within is expanding and also quickly changing, the question naturally arises as to the trustworthiness of its data. In this empirical paper, we will study the reference and metadata coverage within each database and compare them with each other to help address this open question in bibliometrics.

— Reference Coverage Analysis of OpenAlex compared to Web of Science and Scopus (2401.16359 - Culbert et al., 29 Jan 2024) in Abstract