New OpenAlex Authors Rollout

[Jason Portenoy]

Hi all,

Today, we’re launching our new system for disambiguating OpenAlex Authors! 

All 127M of the old Author IDs will be disappearing over the weekend, and will be replaced by new, more accurate ones in the /authors endpoint. Updating all the Author IDs found in the /works endpoint is happening at the same time: this will take about 4-5 days. 

During that time, the author data in Work objects will be inconsistent. Specifically, some of the author IDs will be old, invalid ones.We’ll post an announcement in about 4 days, when all 240M works have been updated and the whole thing is stable again

In case you still need the mapping of old Author IDs to Works, we archived them. We will be sending out a message soon with details on how to download the archive.

Better author disambiguation has been our most-requested feature, and we think this new version is a massive improvement….so we’re super thrilled to be rolling it out! Thanks for your patience as we finish the rollout, and thanks for your invaluable support of OpenAlex.

Sincerely,

OpenAlex Team

[Jason Portenoy]

Update: the new author system is now live! The /authors endpoint is hooked up to the new author IDs, and most works have been updated with the new authors. The data schema has not been affected by the change, just the author data themselves.

The new author IDs have a numeric component >5000000000. Any ID below this is an old author ID, and should not be connected with any works. These old author IDs will still work using the /authors endpoint when requested directly; however, this is temporary, and soon they will return 404 Errors (not found).

We are still finishing up some things, so we will send out a final update when the transition is 100% complete.

Thank you!

OpenAlex Team

[Dave Middleton]

Thank you Team,

This update is a big improvement in author accuracy and I started to explore openAlex further.

I am impressed with the performance and flexibility of the queries one can make. 

Cheers,

Dave