Some recent updates and improvements
Jason Portenoy
Dear OpenAlex Community,
Announcing a few recent updates and improvements in OpenAlex:
Get “aboutness” tags for your own free text
New OA status category: Diamond OA
Authorship.affiliations (schema addition)
Filter by Core Sources used in the Open Leiden Ranking
Filter works that came from MAG and only MAG
“Super system” institutions
Read on for more details.
Also, a quick note about Field Weighted Citation Impact — some of you may have noticed that there is a new field in the Work object: fwci. We will be announcing and fully documenting this new feature soon, but it’s not quite ready for primetime yet. Stay tuned, and thanks for your patience!
Introducing a new API endpoint: /text. Using this API, you can submit your own text (such as a title/abstract for a work-in-progress article, or a grant proposal), and get back OpenAlex topics, domains, fields, subfields, keywords, and concepts, along with confidence scores. Learn all about it in the technical documentation: Aboutness endpoint
The open_access.oa_status field for works now has a new category: diamond. Diamond OA is a subset of Gold for which there is a zero APC list price for authors to publish (i.e., free to publish and free to read). Around 4 million works have been reclassified from gold to diamond. Read more in our help center article: Open Access (OA)
The Work.authorships field now includes information about each institutional affiliation matched to each author: the raw affiliation string and the matched Institution ID. This is in a new field in the Authorship object: affiliations. Documentation is here: https://docs.openalex.org/api-entities/works/work-object/authorship-object#affiliations
The new Source.is_core field denotes whether a Source (i.e., journal) is one of the Core Sources used by CWTS in their Open Leiden Ranking of universities. There are 29,806 of these sources. Read the documentation here, and find a link to the list of the sources: https://docs.openalex.org/api-entities/sources/source-object#is_core
There’s a new API filter for works: mag_only. Works that came from the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) can have different characteristics than works we get from other sources, especially works for which MAG is our only source of information. Since the MAG data ends abruptly in 2021, this can affect time-related analyses especially. Using filter=mag_only:false, you can filter out the works that came from MAG and only MAG. There are about 83M of these works in total. See documentation here: https://docs.openalex.org/api-entities/works/filter-works#mag_only
The new `is_super_system` flag on Institutions indicates whether it is a “super system” institution, such as the University of California System. You may want to exclude these when looking at things like collaborations between institutions—and we do now exclude them in the web interface when showing such results. We’re currently marking 86 institutions as super systems. Read about it in the help center article, and follow links through technical documentation to find the list of these super systems that we’ve identified: https://help.openalex.org/hc/en-us/articles/24831328396311-Institutions
That’s it for now! Happy Monday, and have a great week!
OpenAlex team