Why are my reference counts lower than expected?

A work’s referenced_works list can be shorter than the reference list you see in its PDF or Crossref record. That’s expected, and it comes down to how OpenAlex builds citations: it lists a reference only when it can match it to another work already in OpenAlex.

The usual reasons a reference doesn’t appear:

• The cited work isn’t in OpenAlex, so there’s nothing to link to.
• The source record’s references differ from the final published PDF.
• The source record includes no references, and PDF parsing missed some.
• The reference has no DOI, so metadata-only matching didn’t find it.

For the full explanation of how citation and reference data is built, see Citations in the docs.