Opportunities and Limitations of OpenAlex Data in Representing Journals Published by Universities

Abstract

OpenAlex is an open bibliographic data platform that offers transformative potential for research by providing free, inclusive, and comprehensive access to metadata on scholarly publications. This study explores the representation of university-published journals in OpenAlex, with a focus on the completeness of metadata related to publishing institution affiliations. An analysis of 60 journals from 10 countries, using a comparative approach with Ulrichsweb and ISSN Portal, revealed that while OpenAlex indexes 71.7% of these journals, only 11.6% include metadata on their publishing institution affiliation. These findings highlight significant gaps in metadata coverage, underscoring the need for enhanced curation, improved integration with Wikidata, increased collaboration with regional indexing services, and greater efforts by publishers to provide accurate metadata.