Patricia Alonso-Alvarez Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain INAECU Institute, UC3M-UAM
Nees Jan van Eck Leiden University
Source
via arXiv
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2409.01120
Abstract
Unlike traditional proprietary data sources like Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), OpenAlex emphasizes its comprehensive coverage, particularly highlighting its inclusion of the humanities, non-English languages, and research from the Global South. Strengthening diversity and inclusivity in science is crucial for ethical and practical reasons. This paper analyses OpenAlex’s coverage and metadata availability of African-based publications. For this purpose, we compare OpenAlex with Scopus, WoS, and African Journals Online (AJOL). We first compare the coverage of African research publications in OpenAlex against that of WoS, Scopus, and AJOL. We then assess and compare the available metadata for OpenAlex, Scopus, and WoS publications. Our analysis shows that OpenAlex offers the most extensive publication coverage. In terms of metadata, OpenAlex offers a high coverage of publication and author information. It performs worse regarding affiliations, references, and funder information. Importantly, our results also show that metadata availability in OpenAlex is better for publications that are also indexed in Scopus or WoS.
Figure 1. Overlap of African research publications with a DOI between OpenAlex and Scopus, WoS, and AJOL Source: 10.48550/arXiv.2409.01120
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
