Adoption of OpenAlex FwCI

[Shiva Shabaninejad]

Hello everyone,

I’m interested to hear if anyone is using OpenAlex’s FwCI or percentile metrics. Have you (or your institution) shifted from CNCI (Clarivate) or Scopus FwCI to these indicators, and if so, how do you interpret and apply them in practice? Do you find notable differences in use or meaning compared to the proprietary metrics?

[Samuel Mok]

Hi Shiva,

Last year we did a comparison between data from SciVal and OpenAlex, and found OpenAlex's FwCI to be usable enough to cancel SciVal. 

What I did was pull a list of our university's (University of Twente, a mid-sized Dutch STEM university) publications between 2017 and 2023 (from Pure, our repository), and then retrieved data for them from SciVal and OpenAlex using their DOIs; including number of citations, FWCI, and more details.

Here are some of the results from the analysis:

- In the bottom table, the numbers in red/green show the difference between the amount of input items and the found items. As you can see, OpenAlex is a lot more complete in our case: roughly 30% of the items in our repo were not found in Scival, but almost all were found in OA.
- Either for that reason, or because OpenAlex has a completely different way of creating the "fields",  the mean FWCI of OA is a lot higher in average compared to SciVal's FWCI. This is shown in the first table. I also added the ratio between the FWCI's per year, showing a pretty steady ratio of about 1.5-1.7 between the two.
- The number of citations per paper seem very similar, which seems to indicate that the reason for this difference in FWCI is the difference in fields, not because of the difference in which papers were found in each dataset.

Here's a look at the specific FWCIs found in Scival. Top ones (in terms of # of items found with that field):


And the same but from OpenAlex using the `topic` parameter from OpenAlex (as that comes closes to the `field` in Scival):

or the `subfield` values:

(as you can see: these are much larger buckets compared to SciVal's fields).

So yeah, not 1-to-1 comparable, because the definitions of the fields are not the same. But as you can see, the categories used by OpenAlex are a lot more straightforward and informative, and also include the multiple levels (domain, field, subfield, topic) instead of the strange cluster of 3 terms as a "field" in SciVal.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Samuel

On Thu, Aug 28, 2025 at 10:36 AM Shiva Shabaninejad <shiva....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello everyone,

I’m interested to hear if anyone is using OpenAlex’s FwCI or percentile metrics. Have you (or your institution) shifted from CNCI (Clarivate) or Scopus FwCI to these indicators, and if so, how do you interpret and apply them in practice? Do you find notable differences in use or meaning compared to the proprietary metrics?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OpenAlex Community" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to openalex-commun...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openalex-community/2f356da0-dbcd-4093-a8cb-7c6bfaad613bn%40googlegroups.com.

[Kyle Demes]

Hi folks,

Great discussion to get started Shiva and thanks for quickly chiming in Samuel! 

A quick note to say that we developed and launched an open FWCI because we heard overwhelmingly from institutions how important it was for them. We haven't put together (m)any resources to help institutions rolling it out locally, but I have been hearing from institutions around the world who have started such efforts. And so far everyone seems keen to come together and discuss, so I am happy to try bringing folks together around that topic.

If you and/or others at your institutions are interested in implementing the OpenAlex FWCI at your institution, or if you already have, use the google form below to let me know if you're interested in a virtual meeting and I'll put something together. Once the re-write project is finally completed, I hope to put together similar meetings on more topics as well so this could be a nice pilot.

Here is the form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeimhWC3NF6bgn20lLDg9_sI0aiK80lNk7MHyYWzm58jAfreA/viewform?usp=header 

Feel free to carry on the conversation here and sorry for the interruption!

-kyle

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openalex-community/CANB9rgvsu4GVRS%2BE8N6mgpzR1BD62gwHKrJH4DhYn1p8uLKuog%40mail.gmail.com.