article · Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
Proprietary bibliometric databases such as Web of Science and Scopus have traditionally dominated research metrics but carry a heavy bias towards English-language publications. OpenAlex, launched in 2022 as an open-source alternative, aims to offer more inclusive research information. An evaluation comparing OpenAlex with Web of Science alongside manual validation of 6,836 articles examined the completeness and accuracy of its language metadata. Findings indicate that OpenAlex provides significantly more balanced linguistic coverage than Web of Science. Nevertheless, inaccuracies in its metadata still lead to an overestimation of English-language content and an underestimation of other languages. When used with appropriate critical caution, OpenAlex offers a viable source for representative analyses of multilingual scholarly publishing, although improvements at the infrastructural level remain necessary to enhance metadata reliability.
Academic evaluation has long favoured English-language research due to the dominance of proprietary citation databases. Understanding the accuracy and limitations of open bibliometric platforms enables institutions, researchers, and policymakers to assess global scientific output more equitably. It also highlights where open metadata infrastructures require targeted improvements to reflect global multilingual scholarship properly.
The findings apply directly to organisations, research intelligence providers, and academic institutions developing bibliometric tools and analytics services based on open-source scientific metadata. OpenAlex is already in active use, making these insights immediately relevant for technical teams calibrating metadata ingestion or building benchmarking products. However, commercial application relies on ongoing infrastructural refinements to correct language misclassifications before deploying automated analytics at scale.
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Abstract Clarivate's Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier's Scopus have been for decades the main sources of bibliometric information. Although highly curated, these closed, proprietary databases are largely biased toward English‐language publications, underestimating the use of other languages in research dissemination. Launched in 2022, OpenAlex promised comprehensive, inclusive, and open‐source research information. While already in use by scholars and research institutions, the quality of its metadata is currently still being assessed. This paper contributes to this literature by assessing the completeness and accuracy of OpenAlex's metadata related to language, through a comparison with WoS, as well as an in‐depth manual validation of a sample of 6836 articles. Results show that OpenAlex exhibits a far more balanced linguistic coverage than WoS. However, language metadata are not always accurate, which leads OpenAlex to overestimate the place of English while underestimating that of other languages. If used critically, OpenAlex can provide comprehensive and representative analyses of languages used for scholarly publishing, but more work is needed at infrastructural level to ensure the quality of metadata on language.
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DOI: 10.1002/asi.24979
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