Evaluating the linguistic coverage of OpenAlex: An assessment of metadata accuracy and completeness

Lucía Céspedes, Diego Kozlowski, Carolina Pradier, Maxime Holmberg Sainte‐Marie, Natsumi Solange Shokida, Pierre Benz, Constance Poitras, Anton Boudreau Ninkov, Saeideh Ebrahimy, Philips Ayeni, Sarra Filali, Bing Li and Vincent Larivière

Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 2025, vol. 76, issue 6, 884-895

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.

Date: 2025
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