# Improving author affiliation metadata in Openalex following our transition from proprietary bibliometric tools

Nicolas Alarcon

► To cite this version:

Nicolas Alarcon. Improving author affiliation metadata in Openalex following our transition from proprietary bibliometric tools. Liber 2025, Jul 2025, Lausanne, Switzerland. hal-05234102

HAL Id: hal-05234102

https://hal.sorbonne-universite.fr/hal-05234102v1

Submitted on 1 Sep 2025

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# Improving author affiliation metadata in OpenAlex following our transition from proprietary bibliometric tools

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## ABSTRACT

In 2024, we made a strategic shift in our bibliometric approach, moving away from proprietary tools like Web of Science to embrace open research information. This transition required us to fundamentally reconsider our use of bibliographic databases, focusing on both strategic implementation of Barcelona Declaration principles and operational metadata curation in OpenAlex.

## INTRODUCTION

OpenAlex is an open and comprehensive catalog of scholarly papers, authors, institutions, sources, etc. Accurate and structured author affiliations, linked to standardized organization identifiers such as ROR IDs, are critical for ensuring research metadata quality and strengthening bibliometric analysis reliability.

According to Crossref data, only 30% of articles with DOIs provide author affiliation metadata. To fill these gaps, OpenAlex harvests author affiliations from several sources as part of publication metadata: institution strings from structured sources (Crossref, PubMed) or parsed affiliations from publisher websites.

These raw affiliation strings are then processed using a matching algorithm to link institutions with their ROR IDs. However, this algorithm produces certain inaccuracies that require correction through additional interventions.

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