Evaluating Research Impact through Open Linked Data
Measuring research impact is important to both faculty and their academic institutions. By demonstrating the tangible benefits of the work, these links and metrics contribute to professional reputations and can lead to career advancement. For institutions and funders of research, it can showcase contributions to society and knowledge. These data can be used to secure grants and increased funding.
Subscription-based bibliometric tools like Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions, enable mapping of the world of scholarly research system through linked (meta) data.
However, as institutions’ budgets tighten and the pricing of these subscription services continues to rise, research institutions are eager to assess and express the impact of their research using open access data and a tool that reflects the institutions’ own commitment to open science.
OpenAlex
OpenAlex is one example of such tool. OpenAlex is an open and free database of scholarly works, authors, and institutions. Launched in 2022 by the nonprofit organization OurResearch, it aims to provide a comprehensive alternative to commercial databases like Web of Science and Scopus.
OpenAlex indexes over 250 million scholarly works from 250,000 sources, covering a wide range of disciplines including science, social science, arts, and humanities. It offers features such as citation indexing, author disambiguation, and topic classification. Similar in function to the subscription-based bibliometric tools, OpenAlex distinguishes itself by providing data through both web graphic interface and application programing interface (API) under a Creative Common license that is FAIR compliant.
In the next few sections, we will demonstrate how to access OpenAlex’s data through programmatic API calls in computational notebooks and answer meaningful bibliometric research questions with presentable research impact information. These techniques and materials can be extended to other, subscription-based bibliometric tools like Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions with similar programmatic interfaces through APIs.