Native Overview

Native entities are the ones where OpenAlex mints its own IDs — W123 for a work, A456 for an author, S789 for a source — and each ID encodes a judgment call about a genuine real-world boundary dispute:

• Are these two records the same work, or two different ones?
• Is this cluster of papers all by one author, or several people who share a name?
• Is “Springer Nature” the same publisher as “Springer Verlag”?
• Does this affiliation string mean the University of Washington or Washington University?

There’s no external authority we can just look up for these; the answer is OpenAlex’s best inference, and it can be wrong. That’s why native entities are the ones you can correct through curation, and why every native entity page has an About section explaining where the records come from, what we do to disambiguate them, and the known failure modes.

The native entities

• Works — every scholarly document. The core entity; everything else connects to works.
• Authors — the people who create works, disambiguated from raw authorship strings.
• Sources — journals, conferences, repositories, and other venues where works appear.
• Publishers — the organizations behind sources, arranged in a hierarchy.
• Funders — the organizations that fund research.
• Awards — specific grants, linking funders to the works they funded.
• Institutions — universities, companies, hospitals, and other organizations authors are affiliated with.

Compare these with vocabulary entities, where there’s no boundary to adjudicate — just a consistent handle on something that already exists crisply.