Details how Overton links scholarly books and articles back to specific researchers and their institutions
Overton gets affiliation data from OpenAlex, an open database of scholarly metadata for books and papers.
OpenAlex in turn inherited historical affiliation data from Microsoft Academic, which is what Overton used before it closed in December 2021. OpenAlex now gets affiliation data from “both structured and unstructured sources” – a mix of publisher websites and affiliation metadata in databases like Crossref and ORCID.
If you notice any discrepancies in your affiliation data or your institution’s data, please check OpenAlex and contact them to correct any errors.
Coverage
The quantity and quality of metadata for papers varies – for newer papers publishers often make it easy to see who the authors are and what institutions they are affiliated with, but this isn’t the case with older books and papers.
Speaking very generally about 80% of the scholarly papers seen by Overton have affiliation data available.
We’re able to help users improve this by automatically collecting data from their CRIS – though this is a custom service and typically requires some development work.
It can also be improved in the medium/long term by asking authors to claim their work on their ORCID profiles.
What counts as a standalone institution?
Affiliations from OpenAlex are keyed to ROR IDs (Research Organization Registry identifiers are unique, open, and persistent identifiers for institutions and organisations).
Overton migrated from using GRID to ROR for institutional data in 2026. ROR is actively maintained and continuously growing, making it the preferred standard for identifying research organizations.