# Evaluating the Linguistic Coverage of OpenAlex: An Assessment of Metadata Accuracy and Completeness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.10633 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10633/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [CheckIfExist: Detecting Citation Hallucinations in the Era of AI-Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15871/) (2026)
- [Construction of a Battery Research Knowledge Graph using a Global Open Catalog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20241/) (2026)
- [Towards Nexus-Score: Metadata Gaps Limit Scholarly AI Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22684/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Clarivate's Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier's Scopus have been for decades the main sources of bibliometric information. Although highly curated, these closed, proprietary databases are largely biased towards English-language publications, underestimating the use of other languages in research dissemination. Launched in 2022, OpenAlex promised comprehensive, inclusive, and open-source research information. While already in use by scholars and research institutions, the quality of its metadata is currently being assessed. This paper contributes to this literature by assessing the completeness and accuracy of OpenAlex's metadata related to language, through a comparison with WoS, as well as an in-depth manual validation of a sample of 6,836 articles. Results show that OpenAlex exhibits a far more balanced linguistic coverage than WoS. However, language metadata is not always accurate, which leads OpenAlex to overestimate the place of English while underestimating that of other languages. If used critically, OpenAlex can provide comprehensive and representative analyses of languages used for scholarly publishing. However, more work is needed at infrastructural level to ensure the quality of metadata on language.