Institutions

Eg:I27837315Count:134,448Links:authorships

An institution is an organization that authors are affiliated with — a university, company, hospital, government agency, non-profit, and more. Institutions are how OpenAlex answers “who did this research, and where?”: every work links to the institutions its authors named, so you can roll research up from a single paper to a lab, a university, or a whole country. OpenAlex holds about 135,000 institutions. An institution’s OpenAlex ID looks like I27837315; fetch one at api.openalex.org/institutions/I27837315.

How it’s made

Grounded in ROR

Institutions are one of the few native entities that lean on an outside authority: every OpenAlex institution maps to a record in the Research Organization Registry (ROR), the open community registry of research organizations. ROR supplies the institution’s canonical name, country, location, and — crucially — its place in a hierarchy of parent and child organizations. Because we build on ROR rather than minting boundaries from scratch, most of the “is this the same org?” adjudication happens upstream, and an institution’s ror ID is its stable external handle. Institution metadata is also drawn from Crossref, PubMed, MAG, and publisher websites.

Matching raw affiliation strings

The hard problem isn’t naming institutions — it’s linking works to them. Works list affiliations as free text: a raw affiliation string (RAS) like "MIT, Boston, USA" or "Massachusetts Institute of Technology", often messy and inconsistent. OpenAlex parses each RAS to extract the institutions it names, so both of those examples resolve to the same institution. Parsing runs in three stages: an OpenAlex-trained deep-learning model reads the string and assigns institutions; a monthly rules pass fixes common model errors; and ROR’s own affiliation matcher fills remaining gaps. On the AffilGood benchmark the parser reaches roughly 0.92 recall and 0.93 precision. See raw affiliation strings for the full pipeline, benchmarks, and open-source code.

Lineage and hierarchy

Because OpenAlex inherits ROR’s lineage structure, an institution can roll up to a parent — so you can report on a specific lab or on the university it belongs to. The lineage field lists an institution together with all of its ancestors, and associated_institutions records parent, child, and related organizations. Some large umbrella organizations (e.g. the University of California System, along with some governments and multinational companies) are flagged as super systems via is_super_system; these are excluded from certain analyses so they don’t swamp collaborating-institution results. Complex national research systems (such as French unités mixtes de recherche, which belong to several parents at once) are handled through this same ROR lineage.

Country assignment

Country is assigned through the same affiliation matching. When a raw string matches a ROR record, OpenAlex takes the country from that record’s metadata. When a string can’t be matched to ROR but its address still names a country, OpenAlex assigns the country_code directly, without ROR.

Known failure modes

The parser can miss or mis-assign institutions, especially for organizations added to ROR after the model was last trained (April 2023) — those depend on the rules pass and ROR matcher to be caught at all. Coverage of layered national systems is limited by ROR’s own coverage: where a sub-unit has no ROR record, affiliations can only match its parent. Institutions can also be affected by author-disambiguation errors on the works that feed them. Institutions are correctable through curation; institutions can review and fix their own affiliations with the works-magnet tool.

Attributes

This is the canonical dictionary of every attribute on an institution object. Attributes shared with other entities (id, ids, display_name, works_count, cited_by_count, summary_stats, counts_by_year, created_date, updated_date) are documented once on Common attributes; institution-specific notes are below.

id

String. The OpenAlex ID for this institution, e.g. https://openalex.org/I27837315. See Common attributes.

ids

Object. All known external identifiers for this institution, as URIs where possible; keys with no value are omitted. Institution-specific keys: openalex, ror, grid (the legacy GRID ID that ROR superseded), wikipedia, wikidata, mag. Filterable via ids.openalex.

display_name

String. The institution’s canonical name, from its ROR record. See Common attributes. Filterable and sortable.

display_name_acronyms

List. Known acronyms for the institution (e.g. ["UM"] for the University of Michigan).

display_name_alternatives

List. Other names the institution is known by, including names in other languages (e.g. "Université du Michigan").

ror

String. The institution’s ROR ID — the canonical external identifier for institutions, e.g. https://ror.org/00jmfr291. Filterable, sortable, and groupable; filter has_ror:true/false to select institutions by whether they carry a ROR ID.

country_code

String. The country where the institution is based, as an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code (e.g. US). See Countries. Filterable, sortable, and groupable; the related continent and is_global_south filters derive from it.

type

String. The kind of organization (e.g. education, healthcare, company, government, facility, nonprofit, other). See Institution types for the full vocabulary. Filterable, sortable, and groupable.

type_id

String. The OpenAlex ID form of type, e.g. https://openalex.org/institution-types/education.

lineage

List. OpenAlex IDs of this institution plus all of its ancestor institutions, from ROR’s hierarchy — so an institution’s own ID always appears in its lineage. Filtering lineage:<id> finds an institution and everything beneath it. Filterable, sortable, and groupable.

associated_institutions

List. Related organizations, each a dehydrated institution object plus a relationship of parent, child, or related. Drawn from ROR. Available as a column but not a filter.

is_super_system

Boolean. True for large umbrella organizations (big university systems, some governments and multinational companies) that are excluded from certain analyses so they don’t swamp results. Filterable, sortable, and groupable.

homepage_url

String. The institution’s official homepage.

image_url

String. A URL to an image (usually a logo) for the institution, typically hosted on Wikimedia Commons.

image_thumbnail_url

String. Like image_url, but scaled to a smaller thumbnail (a width query parameter is appended).

geo

Object. The institution’s geographic location: city, geonames_city_id, region, country_code, country, latitude, and longitude.

international

Object. Intended to hold the institution’s display name in multiple languages. Currently unpopulated (an empty object) on essentially all institutions.

repositories

List. Dehydrated source objects for the repositories this institution hosts (e.g. the University of Michigan’s Deep Blue), each with id, display_name, host_organization, host_organization_name, and host_organization_lineage. Available as a column; the repositories.id, repositories.host_organization, and repositories.host_organization_lineage filters let you select institutions by the repositories they host.

roles

List. The other entity roles this organization plays across OpenAlex — an organization can be an institution, a funder, and a publisher at once. Each entry has role, id (the OpenAlex ID of that role’s entity), and works_count. Filter institutions by a co-role’s ID with roles.id.

topics

List. The topics most associated with this institution’s works, each with a count, score, and its subfield/field/domain. See Aboutness for how topics are assigned. Filter with topics.id.

topic_share

List. Like topics, but ranked by this institution’s share of each topic relative to all institutions — surfacing topics where the institution is disproportionately active rather than just high-volume. Filter with topic_share.id.

works_count

Integer. The number of works affiliated with this institution. See Common attributes. Filterable, sortable, and groupable.

cited_by_count

Integer. Total citations across this institution’s works. See Common attributes. Filterable, sortable, and groupable.

summary_stats

Object. Precomputed bibliometric indicators — 2yr_mean_citedness, h_index, i10_index. See Common attributes. Each sub-metric is independently filterable, sortable, and groupable.

counts_by_year

List. Works and citations for this institution per year over roughly the last ten years. See Common attributes — the array is returned newest-first for institutions, so sort by year before slicing.

status

String. The institution’s lifecycle status from ROR (e.g. active). Filterable, sortable, and groupable.

works_api_url

String. A ready-made Works API URL for every work affiliated with this institution — e.g. https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=institutions.id:I27837315. A convenience link, not a stored value; follow it to page through the actual works.

created_date

String. The date this institution was added to OpenAlex (YYYY-MM-DD). See Common attributes.

updated_date

String. The ISO 8601 UTC timestamp of the last change to anything in the institution object. See Common attributes.

Deprecated fields

  • x_concepts — the top concepts associated with the institution. Concepts are a superseded classification; x_concepts is no longer populated on institution objects (topics and topic_share replace it). The x_concepts.id/concepts.id filters remain for continuity.

In the API

The Institutions endpoint is at api.openalex.org/institutions. Fetch a single institution by ID — /institutions/I27837315 — or a list, and filter, search, sort, group, and page over the fields above. A few common patterns:

You can also fetch an institution by its ROR ID directly, e.g. /institutions/ror:00jmfr291. For the full list of endpoints see the endpoints index.

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