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Authors

OpenAlex assembles author profiles algorithmically: it takes the author names on hundreds of millions of works and decides which names refer to the same real person. Modern disambiguation is very good, but at this scale it’s never perfect — works get attached to the wrong profile, one person ends up split across duplicates, names display wrong.

Authors are the big self-serve exception to the ticket-based default: you can fix your own profile yourself, by claiming it.

Claim your profile

  1. Sign in at openalex.org (create a free account if you don’t have one).
  2. Go to your author page — search for your name and open the best match.
  3. Click Claim near the top of the page.

What happens next depends on the email address on your account:

  • Academic or institutional email (a university, research institute, or government domain): your claim is approved on the spot, with no waiting period, and you can start curating right away. If you signed up with a personal address, add and verify your institutional one in your account settings before claiming; any verified address on the account counts.
  • Any other email (Gmail, a company domain, a personal domain): your claim goes into a review queue. To get it through, give us evidence that you’re the person behind these works: a link to a page or paper that shows both the name on the profile and your account email, such as a departmental page, a lab site, or a paper’s author list. Reviews usually take a few days. We don’t need proof that you wrote any particular work, only that you’re a real scholar who is who you say you are.

The claim form asks for evidence in both cases; with an institutional address a sentence is enough, since the address itself is the proof. Either way, claims can be reviewed at any time, and a claim that turns out to be fraudulent is revoked and its edits reverted. The bar is deliberately low, Wikipedia-style: every curation is recorded and reversible, so we’d rather make claiming easy and undo the rare bad edit than make everyone wait. Once approved, you own the profile and can curate it.

What you can fix

Every correction is a curation — an auditable record of who changed what, when. On a profile you’ve claimed, you can:

  • Add missing works — search by title, paste a DOI or OpenAlex ID, or upload your CV and we’ll match the works in it. (Adds are capped at 1,000 per rolling 24 hours; removals are uncapped.)
  • Remove works that aren’t yours — including in bulk.
  • Remove a wrong name — if a name variant on your profile isn’t you, removing it detaches every work carrying that name.
  • Change your display name — the name shown on your profile.
  • Change your match name — the name used to match future works to you (API only).
  • Set or correct your ORCID (API only). This records the ORCID and makes it your match key for future works; it doesn’t move existing works or merge profiles. A wrong ORCID on one of your papers is the publisher’s record and is corrected with them, not here; see ORCID and the how-to.

Everything else on a profile — alternate names, institutional affiliations, topics, citation metrics — is derived from its works, so you don’t (and can’t) edit those directly: fix which works belong to you and the rest follows. That cuts both ways: removing a work or a name variant also removes whatever those works alone were contributing, such as an institution that appeared only on them. (Wrong institution showing on one of your works? That’s an affiliation-matching fix, not an author fix.) The full picture: Authors § A profile is built from its works.

Curations don’t apply instantly: each one is pending until the next data refresh picks it up, and your changes are typically live within about two days. You can track (and cancel) your pending curations from your account.

Split and merge

The two classic disambiguation failures are duplicates (your works spread across two or more profiles) and wrong merges (someone else’s works mixed into yours). There’s no separate merge or split button — both are fixed by moving works, and the moves do the whole job:

  • Merge duplicates. Say profiles A and B are both you, and you’ve claimed A. Add all of B’s works to A (the CV upload makes this fast). The emptied profile goes inert: it stops accruing works and drops out of matching, so it won’t grow back.
  • Split out someone else’s works. If another person’s works have been merged into your profile, remove them. The disambiguation algorithm re-homes removed works to the right profile — that part isn’t your problem.

Using AI agents

The curation API is designed to be agent-legible, and it authenticates with nothing but your API key — which means you can hand the whole cleanup to an AI agent instead of clicking through it yourself. Give an agent your key and a prompt like:

Here's my CV (attached) and my OpenAlex author ID (A5023888391).
Add my missing works, remove the ones that aren't mine, and set my
display name to "J. García-Martínez". Use the OpenAlex curation API;
docs at help.openalex.org/api/author-curation/.

The agent reads your profile, submits the corrections as curations (a POST to /curations with Authorization: Bearer <api_key>), and can poll their status until they’re applied. See Author Curation for the API mechanics.

Fixing a profile that isn’t yours

Claiming is for your own profile. If you’re a librarian, co-author, or research-office staffer cleaning up someone else’s profile, file a ticket — include the author ID, the specific works or names that are wrong, and evidence, per the good-ticket guidance.

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