Vocabulary Overview

Vocabulary entities are a convenient, consistent vocabulary around things that already have very clear real-world existence, with no fuzziness for OpenAlex to adjudicate. We don’t decide what a country is, or invent the concept of a CC-BY license — we just attach a consistent handle to each one so you can filter and group by it reliably.

This is the key contrast with native entities: a native ID like an author ID represents a judgment call that could be wrong and can be corrected. A vocabulary value like article or US represents no judgment call — the boundary is already crisp; we’ve only standardized the label. So vocabulary pages have a Values section (the full controlled list) rather than a curation story.

Vocabulary entities generally use short, human-readable IDs (en for English, US for the United States, article for a journal article) rather than the minted W/A/S scheme.

The vocabulary entities

• Work types — article, preprint, dataset, book, and the rest of a work’s type.
• Source types — journal, conference, repository, ebook platform, and other venue kinds.
• Institution types — education, healthcare, company, government, and so on.
• Countries and continents — geography, as ISO codes.
• Languages — the language of a work’s metadata, as ISO 639-1 codes.
• Licenses — the Creative Commons and other licenses a location can carry.
• Indexes — the external indexes (DOAJ, ROR, …) a source can appear in. These are vocabulary, not native: we’re not minting judgment-call IDs, just consistent handles on crisply-existing lists.

Some classification systems that look like vocabularies — topics, fields, subfields, domains — are grouped under Aboutness instead, because assigning them to a work involves real inference.