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 111 million research articles from this open-source catalogue of both open-access and paywalled journal articles.
Why OpenAlex?
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.
A Perfect Fit
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, ect. 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.
Quality or Quantity?
OpenAlex comprises over 245 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 only keeping those with high-quality metadata like DOI numbers. This means we recommend from a subset of 111 million publications.
Our Approach at Keenious
We prioritize research articles with comprehensive metadata to ensure they provide value to our users. As mentioned, Keenious excludes articles that lack essential information, such as the author's name or publication date. Our curated subset of the OpenAlex dataset, consisting of over 111 million entries, focuses explicitly on research articles with adequate metadata. Our criteria include:
Articles and preprints from conferences, journals, and repositories, which represents current and historical research, including peer-reviewed work.
Publications with valid Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), ensuring accurate citation retrieval.
Non-retracted scientific works, to make sure our database is up-to-date and we can provide valid research recommendations.
Entries with valid data, including titles and abstracts, providing enough information for users to assess relevance.
While OpenAlex includes various types of works, we have focused exclusively on articles and preprints to offer a curated collection of research literature.
For further inquiries about our data source, don't hesitate to get in touch with us at contact@keenious.com.
References:
Next steps for Microsoft Academic - expanding into New Horizons (2021) Microsoft Research. Available at: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/academic/articles/microsoft-academic-to-expand-horizons-with-community-driven-approach/ (Accessed: 16 August 2024).
Singh Chawla, D. (2021) Microsoft Academic Graph is being discontinued. What’s next?, Nature news. Available at: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news/microsoft-academic-graph-discontinued-whats-next (Accessed: 16 August 2024).
Portenoy, J. OpenAlex, International Open Access Week. Available at: https://www.openaccessweek.org/theme-profiles/project-one-ls25b-mtr2j-zrg4m-nh74a-paswr-cwswl-e5g8y#:. (Accessed: 16 August 2024).
About the data – Openalex (2024) OpenAlex Support. Available at: https://help.openalex.org/hc/en-us/articles/24397285563671-About-the-data (Accessed: 16 August 2024).