Institution object

These are the fields in an institution object. When you use the API to get a single institution or lists of institutions, this is what's returned.

associated_institutions

List: Institutions related to this one. Each associated institution is represented as a dehydrated Institution object, with one extra property:

• relationship (String): The type of relationship between this institution and the listed institution. Possible values: parent, child, and related.

Institution associations and the relationship vocabulary come from ROR's relationships.

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
]

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 

country_code

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

country_code: "US"

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 institution put out, and how many times any work affiliated with this institution 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
]

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"

display_name

String: The primary name of the institution.

display_name: "University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill"

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"
]

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
}

homepage_url

String: The URL for institution's primary homepage.

homepage_url: "http://www.unc.edu/"

id

String: The OpenAlex ID for this institution.

id: "https://openalex.org/I114027177"

ids

Object: All the external identifiers that we know about for this institution. IDs are expressed as URIs whenever possible. Possible ID types:

• grid (String: this institution's GRID ID)
• mag (Integer: this institution's Microsoft Academic Graph ID)
• openalex (String: this institution's OpenAlex ID. Same as Institution.id)
• ror (String: this institution's ROR ID. Same as Institution.ror)
• wikipedia (String: this institution's Wikipedia page URL)

• wikidata (String: this institution's Wikidata ID)

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
}  

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"

is_super_system

Boolean: True if this institution is a "super system". This includes large university systems such as the University of California System (https://openalex.org/I2803209242), as well as some governments and multinational companies.

We have this special flag for these institutions so that we can exclude them from other institutions' lineage, which we do because these super systems are not generally relevant in group-by results when you're looking at ranked lists of institutions.

The list of institution IDs marked as super systems can be found in this file.

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"

international

Object: The institution's display name in different languages. Derived from the wikipedia page for the institution in the given language.

• display_name (Object)

  • key (String): language code in wikidata language code format. Full list of languages is here.
  • value (String): display_name in the given language

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",
        ...
    }
}

lineage

List: OpenAlex IDs of institutions. The list will include this institution's ID, as well as any parent institutions. If this institution has no parent institutions, this list will only contain its own ID.

This information comes from ROR's relationships, specifically the Parent/Child relationships.

Super systems are excluded from the lineage. See is_super_system above.

id: "https://openalex.org/I170203145",
...
lineage: [
    "https://openalex.org/I170203145",
    "https://openalex.org/I90344618"
]

repositories

List: Repositories (Sources with type: repository) that have this institution as their host_organization

repositories: [
    {
        id: "https://openalex.org/S4306402521",
        display_name: "University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy (University of Minnesota)",
        host_organization: "https://openalex.org/I130238516",
        host_organization_name: "University of Minnesota",
        host_organization_lineage: ["https://openalex.org/I130238516"]
    }
    // and so forth
]

roles

List: List of role objects, which include the role (one of institution, funder, or publisher), the id (OpenAlex ID), and the works_count.

In many cases, a single organization does not fit neatly into one role. For example, Yale University is a single organization that is a research university, funds research studies, and publishes an academic journal. The roles property links the OpenAlex entities together for a single organization, and includes counts for the works associated with each role.

The roles list of an entity (Funder, Publisher, or Institution) always includes itself. In the case where an organization only has one role, the roles will be a list of length one, with itself as the only item.

roles: [
    {
        role: "funder",
        id: "https://openalex.org/F4320308380",
        works_count: 1004,
    },
    {
        role: "publisher",
        id: "https://openalex.org/P4310315589",
        works_count: 13986,
    },
    {
        role: "institution",
        id: "https://openalex.org/I32971472",
        works_count: 250031,
    }
]

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"

summary_stats

Object: Citation metrics for this institution

• 2yr_mean_citedness Float: The 2-year mean citedness for this source. Also known as impact factor. We use the year prior to the current year for the citations (the numerator) and the two years prior to that for the citation-receiving publications (the denominator).
• h_index Integer: The h-index for this institution.
• i10_index Integer: The i-10 index for this institution.

While the h-index and the i-10 index are normally author-level metrics and the 2-year mean citedness is normally a journal-level metric, they can be calculated for any set of papers, so we include them for institutions.

summary_stats: {
    2yr_mean_citedness: 5.065784263815827,
    h_index: 985,
    i10_index: 176682
}

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"

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"

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"

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    

x_concepts

x_concepts will be deprecated and removed soon. We will be replacing this functionality with Topics instead.

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
]

The DehydratedInstitution object

The DehydratedInstitution is a stripped-down Institution object, with most of its properties removed to save weight. Its only remaining properties are:

• country_code
• display_name
• id
• lineage
• ror
• type