Reference coverage analysis of OpenAlex compared to Web of Science and Scopus

Bibliographic Data

ID21441982
AuthorsJack H Culbert (0009-0000-1581-4021, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, corresponding author), Anne Hobert (0000-0003-2429-2995, Niedersächsische Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen), Najko Jahn (0000-0001-5105-1463, Niedersächsische Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen), Nick Haupka (0009-0002-6478-6789, Niedersächsische Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen), Marion Schmidt (0000-0001-6970-3714, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies), Paul Donner (0000-0001-5737-8483, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies), Philipp Mayr (0000-0002-6656-1658, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences)
Year2025
Volume130
Issue4
Pages2475-2492
Publication date2025-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueScientometrics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0138-9130 • E-ISSN: 1588-2861
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s11192-025-05293-3
OpenAlexW4409343438
LanguageEN
Citations received38
References cited27

OpenAlex is a promising open source of scholarly metadata, and competitor to established proprietary sources, such as the Web of Science and Scopus. As OpenAlex provides its data freely and openly, it permits researchers to perform bibliometric studies that can be reproduced in the community without licensing barriers. 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 report, we will study the reference coverage and selected metadata within each database and compare them with each other to help address this open question in bibliometrics. In our large-scale study, we demonstrate that, when restricted to a cleaned dataset of 16.8 million recent publications shared by all three databases, OpenAlex has average source reference numbers and internal coverage rates comparable to both Web of Science and Scopus. We further analyse the metadata in OpenAlex, the Web of Science and Scopus by journal, finding a similarity in the distribution of source reference counts in the Web of Science and Scopus as compared to OpenAlex. We also demonstrate that the comparison of other core metadata covered by OpenAlex shows mixed results when broken down by journal, where OpenAlex captures more ORCID identifiers, fewer abstracts and a similar number of Open Access status indicators per article when compared to both the Web of Science and Scopus

Bibliometrics · Data science · Information retrieval · Library science · MEDLINE · Political science · Scientometrics · Scopus · Web of science · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Research Data Management Practices · scientometrics and bibliometrics research

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