Institution types
An institution type classifies the kind of organization: a university (education), a hospital (healthcare), a company, a government agency, and so on. Every institution has exactly one type, exposed as its type field, chosen from the short controlled vocabulary below. Because an organization’s kind already exists crisply in the real world, institution types are a vocabulary entity: OpenAlex doesn’t adjudicate what an institution is, it just standardizes the label so you can filter and group by it reliably. Institution types use short, human-readable IDs (education, company) rather than the minted W/A/S scheme; a type’s full ID looks like https://openalex.org/institution-types/education.
How we build it
The vocabulary is derived directly from ROR, the Research Organization Registry, which assigns each organization a type. OpenAlex adopts ROR’s type for each institution, mapping onto the fixed list below (with an other bucket for organizations that don’t fit ROR’s standard categories). We don’t decide the boundary between an education and a healthcare institution; we standardize the label from the ROR standard. See the Institutions guide for more.
Values
The complete controlled vocabulary (live from api.openalex.org/institution-types). The display_name for each type is identical to its ID.
| ID | Definition |
|---|---|
education |
Universities, colleges, and medical schools that educate and employ researchers (e.g., Harvard, Oxford). |
healthcare |
Hospitals and medical centers like Mass General and Johns Hopkins Medicine — not medical schools. |
company |
For-profit companies involved in research, from Google to small biotech firms. |
archive |
Museums, libraries, and zoos that steward research and cultural heritage materials. |
nonprofit |
Non-governmental organizations like the Max Planck Society that conduct or fund research. |
government |
Government agencies that conduct or fund research, like CNRS or the U.S. Geological Survey. |
facility |
Specialized research facilities like national laboratories, telescopes, and particle accelerators. |
other |
Organizations like university presses that don’t fit the standard ROR categories. |
Fields
Each institution type is a small object. Fields shared with other entities are documented once on Common fields.
id
String. The OpenAlex ID for this type, e.g. https://openalex.org/institution-types/education. See Common fields.
display_name
String. The human-readable name of the type — identical to the ID’s final segment (education, company). See Common fields.
description
String. A one-line definition of the type (the same text shown in the Values table above).
works_count
Integer. How many works have an affiliated institution of this type. See Common fields.
cited_by_count
Integer. Total citations across all works affiliated with an institution of this type. See Common fields.
works_api_url
String. A ready-made Works API URL listing every work affiliated with an institution of this type, e.g. https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=authorships.institutions.type:education.
created_date
String. The date this type was added to OpenAlex (YYYY-MM-DD). See Common fields.
updated_date
String. The ISO 8601 UTC timestamp of the last change to this type object. See Common fields.
In the API
The institution-types endpoint is at api.openalex.org/institution-types; fetch a single type by ID at /institution-types/education. To filter institutions themselves by type, use filter=type:education on the institutions endpoint. To filter works by the type of an affiliated institution, filter through the authorships: filter=authorships.institutions.type:company. See Filtering for filter syntax and the endpoints index for all endpoints.