Authorships

An authorship is the join between a work and one of its authors: for a single author, it records their raw name as printed on the work, their position in the byline, whether they’re the corresponding author, and the institutions they listed. Authorships are a component entity — they don’t get their own OpenAlex ID and you never fetch one directly. They live inside a work object, one per author, in the authorships list. Fetch a work such as api.openalex.org/works/W2741809807 and read its authorships array to see them.

How we build it

An authorship starts with a work’s byline — the author-and-affiliation block as it appears on the source record (Crossref, PubMed, ORCID, a repository, or a publisher website). OpenAlex preserves the raw text it received — the raw author name in raw_author_name and the raw affiliation text in raw_affiliation_strings — and then does two rounds of resolution on top of it.

Resolving the author

The raw author name is fed into author disambiguation — the process that clusters the messy name strings across millions of works into real-world people and assigns each a stable author ID. That resolved person is what fills the dehydrated author object. See authors for how disambiguation weighs its signals, why it can split or merge, and how to correct it.

Resolving the institutions

Each of the author’s raw_affiliation_strings is matched to one or more ROR-backed institutions. The mapping — which raw string produced which institution IDs — is preserved in affiliations; the flattened, deduplicated institutions are mirrored into institutions and their countries into countries. See raw affiliation strings for the parsing pipeline, its benchmarks, and its failure modes.

The 100-author cap

To keep works fast to serve, the authorships list is capped at the first 100 authors. Works with thousands of authors (large collaborations, consortium papers) are truncated to the first hundred by byline position; the rest are dropped from the list. Counts like countries_distinct_count reflect only the authorships that survive the cap.

Fields

This is the dictionary of every field on an authorship object, as it appears inside a work’s authorships list. Authorships are a component entity, so they carry none of the common fields (no id, works_count, etc.) — an authorship has no OpenAlex ID of its own.

author_position

String. Where this author sits in the byline: first, middle, or last. Derived from byline order, so it tracks the printed sequence rather than any notion of credit or seniority.

author

Object. The dehydrated author this authorship resolved to: id (the OpenAlex author ID), display_name, and orcid (or null). This is the disambiguated person — follow the id to the full author object.

institutions

List. The distinct institutions this author was affiliated with on this work, each dehydrated: id, display_name, ror, country_code, type, and lineage (the institution and all its ROR ancestors). A flattened view of what affiliations records per raw string.

countries

List. The distinct country codes (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2) for this author’s institutions, e.g. ["CA", "US"]. Derived from the matched institutions, or assigned directly from the raw string’s address when no institution matched.

is_corresponding

Boolean. True if this author is marked as a corresponding author on the work. Corresponding authors are also collected at the work level in corresponding_author_ids.

raw_author_name

String. The author’s name exactly as it appeared on the source record, before disambiguation — e.g. "Heather Piwowar". The unnormalized input to author resolution; the resolved person is in author.

raw_affiliation_strings

List. The exact affiliation text this author printed, one string per affiliation, before institution matching — e.g. ["Impactstory, Sanford, NC, USA"]. The raw input to institution disambiguation; see raw affiliation strings.

affiliations

List. The mapping from each raw affiliation string to the institutions it matched. Each element is an object with raw_affiliation_string (one of the strings above) and institution_ids (the OpenAlex institution IDs that string resolved to). This preserves which printed string produced which institutions, information that the flattened institutions list loses.

raw_orcid

String. The ORCID iD as it arrived on the source record for this authorship, or null. The raw input behind the resolved author.orcid; present so you can see the asserted ORCID even when it differs from the disambiguated author’s.

In the API

Authorships aren’t a top-level endpoint — there’s no /authorships you can list or fetch. You reach them by selecting the authorships field on works, where they appear inline on each work object.

You can still filter works by authorship attributes using dotted filter keys on the works endpoint — the sub-fields flatten into filterable columns:

• authorships.author.id — works by a given author
• authorships.author.orcid — works by a given ORCID
• authorships.institutions.id / .ror / .country_code / .type / .lineage — works affiliated with an institution (or its lineage, country, or type)
• authorships.countries — works with an author from a given country
• authorships.is_corresponding — works filtered on corresponding-author status
• authorships.affiliations.institution_ids — works whose raw-string-to-institution mapping includes an institution

See Filtering for the full syntax and the Works reference for the complete list of authorship filter keys.