How Often Are University Affiliations Misattributed? A Comparison of OpenAlex with Three Proprietary Bibliographic Databases

Slides of a Lightning Talk held at the first Swiss Open Academic Data (SOAD) Day, 10 September 2025. Abstract: Accurate attribution of academic publications to the correct research institutions is important for tracking research dynamics and determining a university’s position in global rankings. Yet inconsistencies in metadata (caused, for instance, by publishers’ lack of structured data or researchers’ failure to follow affiliation naming guidelines) can lead to misattributions in bibliographic databases. This talk presents a comparative analysis of four major databases — Dimensions, OpenAlex, Scopus, and Web of Science — focusing on publications from the TU Wien in the year 2024. More than 4000 DOIs were reviewed across all platforms by comparing affiliation metadata and by conducting manual checks (and corrections) of several hundreds of discrepancies. Some of the databases were then notified of the errors; and this talk also assesses, at least preliminarily, the extent to which data corrections were implemented by the platforms. The presentation thus quantifies misattributions, illustrates how such errors arise, compares database performance (including responsiveness to community curation), and invites discussion on how research support staff can help improve the accuracy of affiliation metadata.