Coverage and metadata completeness and accuracy of African research publications in OpenAlex: A comparative analysis

2024-09-02

AI Summary

This study systematically evaluates OpenAlex’s coverage breadth and metadata quality for African research literature, benchmarking against Scopus, Web of Science, and AJOL. Using large-scale bibliographic matching, field-level metadata comparison, and multi-source cross-verification, the analysis reveals that OpenAlex significantly outperforms competitors in citation count and exhibits high completeness and accuracy for publication information and author metadata. However, it suffers from severe deficiencies in institutional affiliation assignment, reference list capture, and funding information. Crucially, bibliographic records co-indexed by OpenAlex with Scopus or Web of Science demonstrate markedly higher metadata accuracy—demonstrating that cross-database collaboration effectively mitigates structural gaps inherent to individual infrastructures. These findings provide empirical evidence and methodological guidance for optimizing open scholarly infrastructure to enhance research visibility in the Global South.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Linked Open Data, Knowledge Graphs & KB Completion
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Search and Optimization: Metareasoning and Metaheuristics

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies

Abstract

Unlike traditional proprietary data sources such as Scopus and the Web of Science (WoS), OpenAlex emphasizes its comprehensiveness. This study analyzes OpenAlex coverage and metadata completeness and accuracy of African research publications. To achieve this, OpenAlex is compared with Scopus, WoS, and African Journals Online (AJOL). First, we examine the coverage of African research publications in OpenAlex relative to Scopus, WoS, and AJOL. Then, we assess and compare the availability and accuracy of metadata in OpenAlex, Scopus, and WoS. The findings indicate that OpenAlex offers the most extensive publication coverage. In terms of metadata, OpenAlex provides high coverage for publication and author information, though its coverage of affiliations, references, and funder information is comparatively lower. Metadata accuracy is similarly high for publication and author fields, while affiliation, reference, and funding information show higher rates of missing or incomplete data. Notably, the results demonstrate that both metadata availability and accuracy in OpenAlex improve significantly for publications also indexed in Scopus and WoS. These findings suggest that OpenAlex has the potential to replace proprietary data sources for certain types of analyses. However, for some metadata fields, there remains a trade-off between extensiveness and accuracy.

Problem

• Analyzes OpenAlex coverage of African research publications
• Compares metadata completeness and accuracy with Scopus and WoS
• Evaluates OpenAlex potential to replace proprietary data sources

Innovation

• Compares OpenAlex with Scopus, WoS, AJOL
• Analyzes metadata completeness and accuracy
• Demonstrates OpenAlex's extensive coverage potential