Topics missing from many works in latest snapshot

[Jason Augustyn]

I am working with the latest snapshot and finding that around 27% of the documents are missing topics. A lot of these are datatsets, letters, and other document types that might be hard to classify, but there are also a lot of articles and similar document types missing topics. For instance, there are over 32M articles without topics. This complicates using topics for bibliographic analysis.

Anyone have insights on why this might be the case?

[Christos Petrou]

I raised this with the OpenAlex team. It starts in October, peaks in November (I think >80% missing), and is rectified by January. It's all types of papers, both in the snapshot and the API. Tough to do 2025 analysis with such a gap. Hoping for a fix.

On Fri, Feb 27, 2026, 01:23 Jason Augustyn <js.au...@gmail.com> wrote:

I am working with the latest snapshot and finding that around 27% of the documents are missing topics. A lot of these are datatsets, letters, and other document types that might be hard to classify, but there are also a lot of articles and similar document types missing topics. For instance, there are over 32M articles without topics. This complicates using topics for bibliographic analysis.

Anyone have insights on why this might be the case?

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