65: Leveraging Collective Entity Resolution to Improve OpenAlex's Citation Network Repository

Music City Center 

OpenAlex, a free and open-source citation network repository, presents an exciting alternative to Elsevier's proprietary SCOPUS database, offering broader coverage of scholarly work, including papers in diverse languages. However, OpenAlex suffers from metadata inconsistencies, such as missing institutional affiliations and incomplete author records, which limit its utility for research purposes. This project explores the application of collective entity resolution to clean and enhance OpenAlex's citation network data. Unlike traditional methods, collective entity resolution utilizes co-authorship ties in addition to author attributes to disambiguate and enrich metadata. Using a subset of authors-recent recipients of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)-we evaluate the approach's ability to improve data quality and offer insights on network structure. Our findings highlight the potential of collective entity resolution to transform OpenAlex into a high-quality, open-access alternative to SCOPUS, fostering equity and accessibility in academic research.

entity resolution

bibliometrics

open source 

Section on Text Analysis