OpenAlex keywords are finally good

[Jason Priem]

Hi all,

OpenAlex has new keywords, and they're finally good!

419 million works now have them, drawn from a vocabulary of 1.88 million. We had an outside AI judge (OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra) check them, and it rates 91% of them as accurate. The old keywords got 44%. For example, the paper that announced the first gravitational waves used to get tagged "Black hole (networking)." Now it gets "binary black hole mergers," "LIGO," and "ringdown."

Some links if you want to dig in:

- Try it: here are antimicrobial resistance papers that a text search misses: https://openalex.org/q?oql=works+where+keyword+is+(antimicrobial-resistance)+or+title/abstract+has+(%22antimicrobial+resistance%22)
- The blog post: https://blog.openalex.org/openalex-keywords-are-finally-good/
- Code, prompts, benchmarks, and model weights: https://github.com/ourresearch/openalex-keywords
- How keywords work: https://help.openalex.org/data/keywords/

Heads up: the keyword IDs have changed, and about 21,500 old IDs are gone. If you've saved keyword filters, check them against the new list.

And please tell us when a keyword is wrong. The vocabulary will keep changing as you do.

Best,
Jason