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Institution
Institutions are organizations to which authors claim affiliations.
OpenAlex indexes about 109,000 institutions. The Canonical External ID for institutions is the ROR ID. About 94% of institutions in OpenAlex have ROR IDs.
Our information about institutions comes from metadata found in Crossref, PubMed, ROR, MAG, and publisher websites. In order to link institutions to works, we parse every affiliation listed by every author. These affiliation strings can be quite messy, so we’ve trained an algorithm to interpret them and extract the actual institutions with reasonably high reliability.
For a simple example: we will treat both “MIT, Boston, USA” and “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” as the same institution (https://ror.org/042nb2s44).
Institutions are linked to works via the works.authorships property.

The Institution object

id

String: The OpenAlex ID for this institution.
id: "https://openalex.org/I114027177"

ror

String: The ROR ID for this institution. This is the Canonical External ID for institutions.
The ROR (Research Organization Registry) identifier is a globally unique ID for research organization. ROR is the successor to GRiD, which is no longer being updated.
ror: "https://ror.org/0130frc33"

display_name

String: The primary name of the institution.
display_name: "University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill"

country_code

String: The country where this institution is located, represented as an ISO two-letter country code.
country_code: "US"

type

String: The institution's primary type, using the ROR "type" controlled vocabulary.
Possible values are: Education, Healthcare, Company, Archive, Nonprofit, Government, Facility, and Other.
type: "education"

homepage_url

String: The URL for institution's primary homepage.
homepage_url: "http://www.unc.edu/"

image_url

String: URL where you can get an image representing this institution. Usually this is hosted on Wikipedia, and usually it's a seal or logo.
image_url: "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5c/University_of_North_Carolina_at_Chapel_Hill_seal.svg"

image_thumbnail_url

String: Same as image_url, but it's a smaller image.
image_thumbnail_url: "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/5c/University_of_North_Carolina_at_Chapel_Hill_seal.svg/100px-University_of_North_Carolina_at_Chapel_Hill_seal.svg.png"

display_name_acronyms

List: Acronyms or initialisms that people sometimes use instead of the full display_name.
display_name_acronyms:["UNC"]

display_name_alternatives

List: Other names people may use for this institution.
display_name_alternatives: [
"UNC-Chapel Hill"
]

works_count

Integer: The number of Works created by authors affiliated with this institution. Or less formally: the number of works coming out of this institution.
works_count: 202704

cited_by_count

Integer: The total number Works that cite a work created by an author affiliated with this institution. Or less formally: the number of citations this institution has collected.
cited_by_count: 21199844

ids

Object: All the external identifiers that we know about for this institution. IDs are expressed as URIs whenever possible. Possible ID types:
Many institution are missing one or more ID types (either because we don't know the ID, or because it was never assigned). Keys for null IDs are not displayed.
ids: {
openalex: "https://openalex.org/I114027177",
ror: "https://ror.org/0130frc33",
grid: "grid.10698.36",
wikipedia: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University%20of%20North%20Carolina%20at%20Chapel%20Hill",
wikidata: "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q192334",
mag: 114027177
}     

geo

Object: A bunch of stuff we know about the location of this institution:
  • city (String): The city where this institution lives.
  • geonames_city_id (String): The city where this institution lives, as a GeoNames database ID.
  • region (String): The sub-national region (state, province) where this institution lives.
  • country_code (String): The country where this institution lives, represented as an ISO two-letter country code.
  • country (String): The country where this institution lives.
  • latitude (Float): Does what it says.
  • longitude (Float): Does what it says.
geo: {
city: "Chapel Hill",
geonames_city_id: "4460162",
region: "North Carolina",
country_code: "US",
country: "United States",
latitude: 35.9083,
longitude: -79.0492
}

international

Object: todo
international: {
display_name: {
"ar": "جامعة نورث كارولينا في تشابل هيل",
"en": "University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill",
"es": "Universidad de Carolina del Norte en Chapel Hill",
"zh-cn": "北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校",
...
}
}

associated_institutions

List: Institutions related to this one. Each associated institution is represented as a dehydrated Institution object, with one extpa property:
  • relationship (String): The type of relationship between this institution and the listed institution. Possible values: parent, child, and related.
associated_institutions: [
{
id: "https://openalex.org/I2802101240",
ror: "https://ror.org/0483mr804",
display_name: "Carolinas Medical Center",
country_code: "US",
type: "healthcare",
relationship: "related"
},
{
id: "https://openalex.org/I69048370",
ror: "https://ror.org/01s91ey96",
display_name: "Renaissance Computing Institute",
country_code: "US",
type: "education",
relationship: "related"
},
// and so forth
]

counts_by_year

List: works_count and cited_by_count for each of the last ten years, binned by year. To put it another way: each year, you can see how many new works this venue started hosting, and how many times any work in this venue got cited.
Years with zero citations and zero works have been removed so you will need to add those in if you need them.
counts_by_year: [
{
year: 2022,
works_count: 133,
cited_by_count: 32731
},
{
year: 2021,
works_count: 12565,
cited_by_count: 2180827
},
// and so forth
]
​

x_concepts

The "x" in x_concepts is because it's experimental and subject to removal with very little warning. We plan to replace it with a custom link to the Concepts API endpoint.
List: The Concepts most frequently applied to works affiliated with this institution. Each is represented as a dehydrated Concept object, with one additional attribute:
  • score (Float): The strength of association between this institution and the listed concept, from 0-100.
x_concepts: [
{
id: "https://openalex.org/C86803240",
wikidata: null,
display_name: "Biology",
level: 0,
score: 86.7
},
{
id: "https://openalex.org/C185592680",
wikidata: null,
display_name: "Chemistry",
level: 0,
score: 51.4
},
// and so forth
]
​

works_api_url

String: A URL that will get you a list of all the Works affiliated with this institution.
We express this as an API URL (instead of just listing the Works themselves) because most institutions have way too many works to reasonably fit into a single return object.
works_api_url: "https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=institutions.id:I114027177"

updated_date

String: The last time anything in this Institution changed, expressed as an ISO 8601 date string. This date is updated for any change at all, including increases in various counts.
updated_date: "2022-01-02T00:27:23.088909"

created_date

String: The date this Institution object was created in the OpenAlex dataset, expressed as an ISO 8601 date string.
created_date: "2017-08-08"

The DehydratedInstitution object

The DehydratedInstitution is stripped-down Institution object, with most of its properties removed to save weight. Its only remaining properties are:
​
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The Institution object
id
ror
display_name
country_code
type
homepage_url
image_url
image_thumbnail_url
display_name_acronyms
display_name_alternatives
works_count
cited_by_count
ids
geo
international
associated_institutions
counts_by_year
x_concepts
works_api_url
updated_date
created_date
The DehydratedInstitution object