Authors
An author is a person who creates works — a researcher, scholar, or anyone credited on a scholarly document. Authors are one of OpenAlex’s native entities: OpenAlex mints each a stable ID by disambiguating the messy author-name strings that appear on works into real-world people. There are over 120 million disambiguated authors. An author’s OpenAlex ID looks like A5023888391; fetch one at api.openalex.org/authors/A5023888391.
How we build it
Scholarly works list author names in all sorts of ways. “J. Smith,” “John Smith,” and “John A. Smith” might all be the same person — or three different people. Author disambiguation — the process we call author entity resolution (AER) — is how OpenAlex decides which authorships across millions of works belong to the same real-world person, and assigns each a stable author ID. Author data comes from Crossref, PubMed, ORCID, publisher websites, and the legacy Microsoft Academic Graph.
The challenge
The same person’s name appears differently from paper to paper, and different people share the same name. OpenAlex uses machine learning to cluster authorships into real-world authors even when the name strings vary — and to keep distinct people apart even when their names match.
The signals
The disambiguation model weighs six signals when deciding whether two authorship records belong to the same person:
- Name similarity — string matching across name variants.
- Co-author patterns — shared collaborators across papers.
- Institutional affiliations — consistent workplace signals.
- Research topics — whether the publication record is topically coherent.
- Citation patterns — self-citation and reference overlap.
- ORCID — when present, an authoritative identity signal.
So if “J. Schmidt” and “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” both write about 19th-century ketchup production at the same university, we treat them as one author — but we won’t lump in the J.J.J. Schmidt who writes about weasel migration, even though the names match.
The institutional-affiliation signal itself comes from OpenAlex parsing each work’s raw affiliation strings into institutions — see those pages for how affiliation text is matched to ROR-backed institutions and countries.
The July 2023 upgrade
In July 2023, OpenAlex switched to a significantly improved disambiguation system: a better clustering model, smarter assignment for newly published works, and deeper ORCID integration. As part of the switch, all old author IDs were deprecated and every author was assigned a new ID. The old IDs and their works are preserved as a data dump. New author IDs have a numeric component above 5000000000 and have been used since late July 2023 (and in snapshots from August 2023 onward).
Special author IDs
Two author IDs fall outside the normal disambiguation process; you may encounter them, especially in the snapshot:
A9999999999— the NULL author. Assigned to authorships that never went through disambiguation: no author name was received, the name was too short or too long to disambiguate reliably, or the name matched an ignored phrase (like “Unknown Author”). If an author asks to have their disambiguated profile removed, their works are reassigned here — effectively removing the profile. These records are grouped under this single NULL author rather than real profiles. For the short version, see Why are some authors assigned to NULL AUTHOR_ID (A9999999999)? in the Help center.A5317838346— deleted authors. Used when an author ID is removed from OpenAlex, usually because it no longer has any works (its works were merged into another author or deleted).
Known failure modes
Disambiguation isn’t perfect. The two failure modes are splitting (one real person’s works spread across several profiles) and merging (works from different people collapsed into one profile). Because a profile’s attributes — alternate names, institutions, metrics, topics — are all derived from its linked works, they can’t be edited directly. You fix an author by correcting which works belong to them: see How can I fix errors in an OpenAlex author profile?. Our methods, code, and trained models are fully open source (openalex-name-disambiguation; live pipeline).
Fields
This is the canonical dictionary of every field on an author object. Fields 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 fields; author-specific notes on them are below.
id
String. The OpenAlex ID for this author, e.g. https://openalex.org/A5023888391. See Common fields.
ids
Object. All known external identifiers for this author, as URIs where possible; keys with no value are omitted. Author keys are openalex, orcid, and (rarely) scopus. Filter, group_by, and sort on the orcid and scopus sub-keys.
display_name
String. The author’s name — the single most-frequent, most-informative form observed across their works. See Common fields. Filterable and sortable; free-text name search uses the search parameter (the display_name.search filter is deprecated).
display_name_alternatives
List. Other name strings seen for this author, deduplicated (e.g. ["Jason Priem", "Priem, Jason"]). Useful for matching against name forms that differ from the canonical display_name.
orcid
String. The author’s ORCID iD as a URL, or null. ORCID is the canonical external identifier for authors; each maps to at most one OpenAlex author. Filter, sort, and group_by are supported; use has_orcid:true/false to select on presence.
full_name
String. The author’s full name as parsed from their works. In practice usually identical to display_name.
raw_author_names
List. The exact raw author-name strings, as they appeared on the source works, that were clustered into this author during disambiguation. The unnormalized inputs behind display_name_alternatives.
affiliations
List. The author’s affiliation history: one entry per institution, each { institution, years }, where institution is a dehydrated institution (with id, ror, display_name, country_code, type, lineage) and years lists the publication years OpenAlex saw them there. Derived from the authorships on the author’s works. Like other precomputed conveniences it’s capped — it reflects roughly the last 10 years; for a complete affiliation history, query works filtered by author.id and the institution and group by year. Filter/sort/group_by on the dotted sub-fields affiliations.institution.id, .ror, .country_code, .type, and .lineage.
last_known_institutions
List. The institution(s) from the author’s most recent work, dehydrated (id, ror, display_name, country_code, type, lineage), or an empty list / null when unknown. A convenience for “where are they now”; the full picture is in affiliations. Filter/sort/group_by on last_known_institutions.id, .ror, .country_code, .continent, .is_global_south, .type, and .lineage.
topics
List. The topics this author works on most, ranked, each with a count of the author’s works on it plus its subfield, field, and domain. Filter and group_by with topics.id. See Aboutness for how topics are assigned.
topic_share
List. The author’s share of world output on each topic: a value measuring how concentrated the author is on that topic relative to everyone. Higher means the author accounts for a larger fraction of that topic’s works. Filter and group_by with topic_share.id.
x_concepts (deprecated)
List. Legacy concept tags the author works on, each with a score (0–100). Concepts are a superseded classification retained for continuity; topics are the current one. Filter and group_by with x_concepts.id.
works_count
Integer. Number of works by this author. See Common fields. Filterable, sortable, and groupable. Authors with works_count:0 (e.g. profiles emptied by curation) are hidden from list results by default.
cited_by_count
Integer. Total citations across all of this author’s works. See Common fields.
summary_stats
Object. Precomputed bibliometric indicators — 2yr_mean_citedness, h_index, i10_index. See Common fields. Each sub-field is filterable, sortable, and groupable (e.g. summary_stats.h_index:>40).
counts_by_year
List. Per-year { year, works_count, oa_works_count, cited_by_count } for roughly the last ten years. See Common fields — including why the array’s sort direction isn’t consistent across entity types (sort by year yourself).
works_api_url
String. A ready-made Works API URL that returns this author’s works — https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=author.id:A…. A convenience so you don’t have to build the filter yourself.
block_key
String. An internal blocking key (a coarse name signature, e.g. j priem) used during disambiguation to group candidate authorships before finer clustering. Exposed mainly for debugging; filterable/sortable/groupable.
created_date
String. The date this author was added to OpenAlex (YYYY-MM-DD). See Common fields.
updated_date
String. The ISO 8601 UTC timestamp of the last change to anything in the author object — including routine citation-count recomputation. See Common fields.
In the API
The Authors endpoint is at api.openalex.org/authors. Fetch a single author by ID — /authors/A5023888391 — or a list, and filter, search, sort, group, and page over the fields above. Authors with no works are hidden from list results by default. For the full list of endpoints see the endpoints index.