Fixing Errors: Overview
OpenAlex is built by inference at enormous scale, and inference is sometimes wrong. When you find an error, there are two lanes: a few high-volume cases you can fix yourself, right now, in the app — and everything else, which is a ticket that our AI agents turn into a verified correction. This page routes you to the right lane.
Which lane am I in?
| What’s wrong | What to do |
|---|---|
| Your own author profile — wrong or missing works, name variants, duplicate profiles | Fix it yourself, no ticket needed — Fixing authors |
| Affiliation matching — works matched to the wrong institution, or your institution seems to be missing works | Self-serve for member institutions, ticket otherwise — Fixing affiliations |
| Your institution’s own record — its name, alternate names, or hierarchy | Fix it at ROR — OpenAlex syncs institution records from ROR |
| Anything else — a work’s open-access status, metadata, dates, citations, a missing work or journal | File a ticket — Fixing data errors has the recipes |
What can I fix myself?
The two highest-volume error classes are fully self-serve:
- Your author profile. Claim it and you can add and remove works, correct your names, and merge duplicate profiles — the fix is live within a day or two. (You can also make your profile private.)
- Affiliation matching. If you’re at a member institution, the Affiliation Editor lets you correct how affiliation strings map to your institution — see Fixing affiliations.
Both are also fully drivable by AI agents: hand your agent your CV and your API key, and it can do the whole cleanup for you.
How do I report everything else?
File a ticket. No forms, no special tools — just include four things, and your report can be acted on in minutes:
- The record’s ID or URL (e.g.
W2741809807or the DOI) — not just a title. - What’s wrong — the specific field or claim.
- What’s right — the correct value.
- Evidence — a URL we can check.
Fixing data errors has recipes for the most common reports (open-access status, sources, dates, missing works).
What happens after I report?
Our AI agents read every report, verify it against the evidence, and apply the fix — or escalate to a human when a report points at a bigger bug. We’re a small team with a big pipeline, so not every ticket gets a reply, but every ticket is read and acted on where it can be. The full story of how corrections work is in the Fixing errors reference.
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