Feature request: corresponding author

[Thomas Klebel]

Hi all!

In many scientometric tasks author roles are important. OpenAlex provides categories (first, middle, last), however, it would be great if we could additionally have a field for corresponding_author: TRUE/FALSE.

One use case is research on Open Access: at some institutions, corresponding authorship is tied to the institution covering APCs. It is also a general marker of an important role/function for a given author. Studies using Web of Science commonly rely on first and corresponding authors when assigning works to institutions (recent example: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0272730).

Would this in any way be possible to implement?

Best,

Thomas

[Casey Meyer]

Hi Thomas,

Yes we agree! We worked on this a while ago and are already tagging quite a few articles in the background. We need to do another review of the data to make sure the accuracy is what we expect, then we can consider adding the field to OpenAlex. No guarantees on the timeline but wanted to let you know we are working on this. In fact, I checked the database for the example you mentioned, and we accurately marked the first author as "is_corresponding" in the process we are testing out.

Thanks,
Casey

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Casey Meyer

Developer - OpenAlex, Unpaywall

OurResearch: We build tools to make scholarly research more open, connected, and reusable—for everyone.

[Thomas Klebel]

Hi Casey,

thanks for your response. It is great that you are working on this! After I submitted the post I realised you mentioned this issue in your STI conference paper, so you were obviously aware.

Looking forward to the data, whenever it becomes available.

Best,

Thomas

[Christian Schmidt]

Hi All.
Sorry for digging up an old thread, but I was wondering if there are any updates on this topic?
Thanks, Christian

[Casey Meyer]

Hi Christian,

We're still working on it. We just ran some statistics to see how often our software is detecting corresponding authors, and over all it needs to improve, especially with newer articles. We want to get the coverage a bit higher before we release it, so we're putting more resources behind it. This is a very high priority for us so we're determined to get it done!

Thanks,
Casey