Keenious's search results come from OpenAlex, an open catalog of the global research system that contains more than 300 million works. Keenious does not use all of it: it indexes a curated subset of around 188 million works — the substantive academic literature — and filters out the rest.
Why Keenious uses OpenAlex
It is the largest open catalog of research, freely available and maintained by the non-profit OurResearch rather than a commercial publisher.
It indexes roughly five times as many open-access journals as Scopus or Web of Science, and covers the social sciences, humanities, and African research more completely.
It includes research in more than 100 languages.
It is updated continuously, so recently published work appears without long delays.
What Keenious adds
Curation: OpenAlex is filtered down to substantive scholarship, with junk, duplicates, and predatory venues removed. See How Keenious Curates Its Index.
A peer-review signal: Norwegian Scientific Index labels identify recognized venues, including many outside English-language publishing.
Field-normalized metrics: citation impact (FWCI) is recomputed so a paper is compared with others in its own field rather than by raw citation count.
Language handling: Keenious detects each work's language itself (more than 170 languages) and matches results to the language of the query.
Limitations
No catalog is complete or free of errors. The main limitations that affect results:
Citation counts are lower for non-Western and non-English research, where citation data is less complete, so they should be treated as one signal among several.
Some records have no abstract or reference list. Because search matches on titles and abstracts, records without an abstract are harder to surface.
Some records are mislabeled in the source data — for example, a preprint recorded as a journal article.
Keenious is intended for discovery rather than as a complete bibliographic record. For citation studies, systematic reviews, or other work that requires the full corpus, OpenAlex is available directly. For questions about the data, contact us at contact@keenious.com.
References
These points draw on independent, peer-reviewed studies of OpenAlex:
Maddi et al. (2025), PLOS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0320347 — coverage of open-access journals, disciplines, and world regions versus Scopus and Web of Science.
Céspedes et al. (2025), JASIST. DOI: 10.1002/asi.24979 — accuracy of OpenAlex's language metadata.
Alonso-Álvarez & van Eck (2025), Quantitative Science Studies. DOI: 10.1162/qss.a.396 — metadata completeness across databases.
Haupka et al. (2024–2025), Quantitative Science Studies and Scientometrics. DOI: 10.1007/s11192-025-05524-7 — document-type classification and non-research content.