Understanding Our Data Source: How Keenious Uses OpenAlex for Research Recommendations

When we first introduce Keenious, people often ask, 'Where do the papers come from?' The short and sweet answer is that they come from OpenAlex. Keenious has analyzed and indexed the metadata of over 250 million research articles from this open-source catalogue of both open-access and paywalled journal articles.

When developing Keenious, ensuring high-quality data and article recommendations was paramount. OpenAlex provides a transparent and comprehensive bibliographic catalogue containing the essential metadata, making it a perfect fit for Keenious.

Launched by the OpenResearch Foundation in January 2022, OpenAlex aims to continue on from MAG (Microsoft Academic Graph), which was discontinued at the end of 2021¹. MAG was a crucial data point for many groups and researchers who needed metadata on publications, topics, citations, etc. With the retirement of MAG, a void emerged.²

OpenAlex fills this gap by offering a reliable and accessible source of scholarly data to the research community. Funded by the non-profit OurResearch, OpenAlex emphasizes community and inclusivity. Its open-source nature fosters innovation, transparency, and, importantly, discovery.³

Keenious, like many academic toolmakers, faced challenges following MAG's discontinuation. Although we retained the MAG data, we needed a way to stay current with the latest publications. OpenAlex's mission aligns closely with our values of independence from large for-profit entities and commitment to data openness, ensuring accessibility, innovation, and engagement.

OpenAlex comprises over 250 million research publications, including journals, conference papers, and workshop papers. The dataset is curated from web crawls, subject-area and institutional repositories, and other sources such as Crossref, ORCID, ROR, DOAJ, Unpaywall, Pubmed, and The ISSN International Centre.⁴ Each publication is tagged with a range of bibliographic data like authors, publishers, topics, and citation information. This wealth of information created a world of opportunities. However, at Keenious, we have chosen to narrow down this enormous list of publications by removing those marked as retracted.

We have focused on articles and preprints to offer a collection of research literature. There are a limited number of books also included, but they are unlikely to be surfaced in your recommendations.

For further inquiries about our data source, don't hesitate to get in touch with us at contact@keenious.com.