Authors Overview
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.
This page covers what a profile is and what every attribute means. How profiles are built from raw author names is on Disambiguation; how OpenAlex sources and uses ORCID iDs — and why a profile may be missing one — is on ORCID.
About
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. OpenAlex builds author profiles by disambiguating those names — deciding which authorships across millions of works belong to the same real-world person, and giving each person a stable ID. How that works — the signals the model weighs, the 2023 upgrade, the special NULL and deleted-author IDs, and the ways it fails — is on Disambiguation. How ORCID fits in is on ORCID.
A profile is built from its works
This is the single most useful thing to understand about author profiles: a profile is a set of works, and almost everything else on it is computed from those works. The alternate names are the name variants printed on the linked works. The affiliations are the institutions those works carry. The topics, the citation counts, works_count, summary_stats — all derived. OpenAlex doesn’t store them separately, and nobody can edit them directly.
So the fix for nearly any author problem is to change which works belong to the profile, and let everything else follow:
- A wrong institution on a profile is there because some linked work carries it. Ask which work, and either remove that work (if it isn’t the author’s) or correct its affiliation (if it is — that’s an affiliation fix, not an author fix).
- Removing a name variant detaches every work printed under that name — and with them, any institution, topic, or citation those works were contributing. Institutions still supported by the works you keep stay put.
- Removing a work likewise takes its affiliations with it, for the same reason.
- “Merging” duplicate profiles is just moving the works from one to the other; the emptied profile goes inert. There’s no separate merge operation underneath.
If you’re ever surprised that an institution, name, or topic disappeared from a profile after an edit, this is why: you changed the works, and the profile re-derived itself. See Fixing errors: Authors for the mechanics, and Disambiguation § Known failure modes for the two classic ways profiles go wrong.
Attributes
This is the canonical dictionary of every attribute on an author object. Attributes 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 attributes; author-specific notes on them are below.
id
String. The OpenAlex ID for this author, e.g. https://openalex.org/A5023888391. See Common attributes.
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 attributes. 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 is meant to map to one OpenAlex author. Filter, sort, and group_by are supported; use has_orcid:true/false to select on presence. Null far more often than you’d expect — an ORCID only reaches OpenAlex attached to a work’s metadata, and most authorships don’t carry one. How it’s sourced, used, and set: ORCID.
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 attributes. 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 attributes.
summary_stats
Object. Precomputed bibliometric indicators — 2yr_mean_citedness, h_index, i10_index. See Common attributes. 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 attributes — 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 attributes.
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 attributes.
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.
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