Why we settled on OpenAlex for metadata over the alternatives.

Every recommendation we make is only as good as the metadata underneath it. Before we could match anything, we had to decide where venue, citation, and authorship data would come from — and that decision shaped everything above it.

Coverage over polish

Commercial indexes are cleaner, but they're closed, expensive, and forbid the kind of redistribution a tool like ours needs. OpenAlex is open, has comparable coverage for our fields, and lets us cache and show the provenance of every number. We accepted noisier author disambiguation in exchange.

Where OpenAlex falls short — mainly very recent preprints — we supplement with direct feeds. But the spine is open data, and that's a deliberate choice we'd make again.