Affiliations

“The affiliations are wrong” means one of two different things, with two different fixes: either OpenAlex matched an affiliation string to the wrong institution (or missed it), or the institution’s own record is wrong. Figure out which one you have and the rest is easy.

Wrong or missing institution match

OpenAlex reads the raw affiliation strings authors put on their papers (“Dept. of Physics, MIT, Cambridge MA”) and matches each one to an institution. The matcher handles messy text in many languages, but it can pick the wrong institution or fail to match at all.

If you’re at a member institution, fix it yourself with the Affiliation Editor (in your account settings on openalex.org). It shows every raw affiliation string, searchable and filterable by whether it’s linked to your institution; for each string you can see the works carrying it, then link it to your institution or unlink a wrong match — one at a time or in bulk, thousands of rows at once. Corrections apply automatically as curations, no review queue, and are live within about two days; you can track each one’s status (pending → applied) from your account. To undo a correction, submit the opposite one.

Anyone can report a one-off — a single work showing the wrong institution, a string matched badly — by filing a ticket: include the work URL, the affiliation string, and the institution it should (or shouldn’t) match.

Using AI agents

Like author curation, affiliation curation is plain HTTP with your API key — an AI agent can do an entire cleanup for you. The loop an agent runs:

1. Find candidates: GET api.openalex.org/raw-affiliation-strings?q=<search>&unmatched-institutions=I123… lists strings containing your search text that aren’t yet linked to your institution (matched-institutions= audits existing links).
2. Submit corrections: POST user.openalex.org/curations (with Authorization: Bearer <api_key>) — a JSON array of {"entity": "ras", "entity_id": "<the exact string>", "property": "institution_ids", "action": "add", "value": "https://openalex.org/I123…"} (or "action": "remove" to unlink). The response reports each item’s outcome individually.
3. Track: GET user.openalex.org/curations?entity=ras&status=pending until they’re applied.

One quirk worth knowing: a string OpenAlex hasn’t indexed yet is rejected with a “retry after the next daily update” message — wait a day and resubmit.

The institution itself is wrong

If the problem is the institution’s name, alternate names, parent/child hierarchy, or other metadata — a campus listed under the wrong parent university is the classic case — the fix doesn’t happen in OpenAlex at all. OpenAlex syncs its institution records from ROR, the open registry of research organizations. Look up the institution at ror.org/search and use the “suggest a change” link on its record; once ROR accepts the change, it flows into OpenAlex automatically.

How matching works

Curious why a string matched the way it did? Raw affiliation strings explains the matching pipeline — the model, the rules pass, and its known failure modes.