Inflated number of articles in OpenAlex and its impact on FWCI

[M. Santín]

Hello everyone,

Recently, at the University of Groningen we discovered that OpenAlex is misclassifying posters (and possibly other output types) registered in our CRIS as research articles. 

 

Our test case relates to three different researchers at three different stages of their. academic development at the Faculty of Arts (in Psycholinguistics): Miguel Santin, Angeliek van Hout and Petra Hendriks.

During their career, the three of them have mostly carried out their research at the University of Groningen. However, the number of articles attributed to them in OpenAlex is disproportionate to the number of articles in the CRIS of the university (even when conference papers are considered as articles). Further, we found that several of the works labeled as "articles" in OpenAlex are actually outputs saved as "posters" in our CRIS.

Overview table of comparison:

The issue at hand has two important consequences already visible in the data:

  

a) A very large number of works in OpenAlex (due to the misclassification and possible duplication of works)

b) Large FWCI values in OpenAlex (due to large amount of non-cited works produced by the misclassification) 

Has anyone come across a similar issue? This problem is only visible when examining data at individual level and not when using aggregated data. 

Best regards,

Miguel Santin

[Christos Petrou]

Type mis-classification seems to have been an issue for the full 2026, possibly starting late 2025. Take for example Scientific Reports. It had 250 review papers in 2024 and 2025; none in 2026. This is the case with pretty much every peer-reviewed journal and their publishers.

Here is another example. Frontiers had 8,000 reviews in 2024 and 12,000 in 2025 (they are milking it); they have... 1(!) in 2026. Editorials, errata, and many other stuff have disappeared too. You can check Frontiers via the links below.

https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=primary_location.source.publisher_lineage:p4310320527,publication_year:2024

https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=primary_location.source.publisher_lineage:p4310320527,publication_year:2025

https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=primary_location.source.publisher_lineage:p4310320527,publication_year:2026

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