Errors in ORCID data

Jason Augustyn

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Mar 14, 2023, 9:53:47 AM3/14/23

to OpenAlex users

Hi, my team is finding errors in the ORCID data for authors. For example, for this author:

Prashant V. Kamat

OpenAlex iD: https://api.openalex.org/authors/A676899608

ORCID provided by OpenAlex: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7715-3396

The ORCID provided by OpenAlex points to a different person.

We've noted enough occurrences of this to be concerned about relying on the ORCID linking. Any idea what's going on?

Thanks!

Jason Augustyn

Casey Meyer

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Mar 15, 2023, 11:51:23 AM3/15/23

to OpenAlex users

Hi Jason,

These errors sometimes come through via incorrect publisher data that trickles down through Crossref. But it could be an issue on our end as well. We will take a look! Do you have more examples that you can send via a spreadsheet?

Thanks,
Casey

Jason Augustyn

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Mar 16, 2023, 4:48:28 PM3/16/23

to OpenAlex users

Hi Casey, I asked one of my team members to run an analysis comparing author names in OpenAlex against ORCID record names for a document sample we were working with on another project. I've attached the results. As you'll see, out of around 50,000 names, we saw a 13.65% mismatch rate, using a somewhat conservative threshold for Levenshtein distance. That's pretty high, so any insight would be appreciated!

oa-orcid-analysis.xlsx

Casey Meyer

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Mar 16, 2023, 4:53:46 PM3/16/23

to Jason Augustyn, OpenAlex users

Hi Jason,

We believe we found the issue that is causing this and we're in the process of correcting it. It will take some time for it to propagate back through the API. Hopefully you will see improvements over the next week or so.

Thanks again for bringing this to our attention!

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.

Jason Augustyn

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Mar 16, 2023, 5:16:08 PM3/16/23

to Casey Meyer, OpenAlex users

That's great news! When can we expect the changes to appear in the database snapshot?

Casey Meyer

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Mar 17, 2023, 9:48:14 AM3/17/23

to Jason Augustyn, OpenAlex users

The goal is that these changes make it into the next snapshot at the end of this month.

Casey

Jason Augustyn

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Mar 17, 2023, 9:48:35 AM3/17/23

to Casey Meyer, OpenAlex users

Great!

Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 16, 2023, at 17:33, Casey Meyer <ca...@ourresearch.org> wrote:

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