Retrieving Historical Institutional Affiliations of an Author Objec

[Bilal Moin]

Hello everyone,
I've been using the OpenAlex API and have found it extremely useful so far. I've been able to retrieve information about an author object, including their current last_known_institution. However, I'm interested in gathering more historical data about the authors.

Specifically, I'd like to know if there's a way to retrieve the previous or historical institutions affiliated with an author, not just their last known institution. For example, if an author has worked at three different institutions over their career, I'd like to be able to retrieve all three, not just the most recent one.

Is there a method or a different API endpoint I should be using to get this historical institution data? Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

[Casey Meyer]

Hi Bilal,

We're glad you're enjoying OpenAlex! You're right, there is no way to access previous institutions when viewing a single author. It's a good idea and we will consider adding that someday. 

However, it's still possible to get all of an author's associated institutions by viewing their works. If you go to the works_api_url field for an author, then look at the institutions for that author within each work, you will find the institution that they were associated with at the time they wrote that article. If you went through all of the works for an author and collected the institutions, then removed duplicates, you would have a full list of current and previous institutions.

Hope that helps.

Thanks,
Casey

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OpenAlex users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to openalex-user...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openalex-users/61c54cc5-4fb7-44b6-a0f7-36b52739a2f8n%40googlegroups.com.

--

Casey Meyer

Developer - OpenAlex, Unpaywall

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