Coverage and metadata availability of African publications in OpenAlex: A comparative analysis

Abstract:  Unlike traditional proprietary data sources like Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), OpenAlex emphasizes its comprehensive coverage, particularly highlighting its inclusion of the humanities, non-English languages, and research from the Global South. Strengthening diversity and inclusivity in science is crucial for ethical and practical reasons. This paper analyses OpenAlex's coverage and metadata availability of African-based publications. For this purpose, we compare OpenAlex with Scopus, WoS, and African Journals Online (AJOL). We first compare the coverage of African research publications in OpenAlex against that of WoS, Scopus, and AJOL. We then assess and compare the available metadata for OpenAlex, Scopus, and WoS publications. Our analysis shows that OpenAlex offers the most extensive publication coverage. In terms of metadata, OpenAlex offers a high coverage of publication and author information. It performs worse regarding affiliations, references, and funder information. Importantly, our results also show that metadata availability in OpenAlex is better for publications that are also indexed in Scopus or WoS.