OpenAlex has recently emerged as a leading alternative to proprietary bibliometric sources. However, concerns remain regarding the quality of its metadata, especially the institutional profiles which are crucial for evaluating organizations. This study assesses the quality of affiliation data in OpenAlex using German research institutions. Publications from top-tier journals were analyzed and institutional publication counts in OpenAlex were systematically compared with counts in Scopus. The results show that OpenAlex generally contains more publications at the journal level, reflecting its broader coverage. However, institutional publication counts in OpenAlex are consistently lower, indicating missing or incorrectly assigned affiliations. Nevertheless, the correlations between institutional outputs in both databases are very high, suggesting that relative institutional rankings remain stable. These findings suggest that OpenAlex is suitable for comparative institutional analyses in academic research but requires further improvement in affiliation metadata before it can be used for evaluation contexts that rely on absolute publication counts.

翻译：OpenAlex近期已成为专有文献计量来源的主要替代方案。然而，其元数据质量——尤其是对机构评估至关重要的机构概况——仍存在隐忧。本研究以德国科研机构为对象，评估了OpenAlex中隶属关系数据的质量。通过分析顶级期刊论文，系统比较了OpenAlex与Scopus中的机构发文量。结果表明：OpenAlex在期刊层面通常包含更多论文，体现了其更广泛的覆盖范围；但机构发文量始终较低，反映出隶属关系数据存在缺失或标引错误。不过，两个数据库中机构产出的相关性极高，表明机构相对排名保持稳定。这些发现表明，OpenAlex适用于学术研究中的机构比较分析，但在涉及绝对发文量的评估场景中，其隶属关系元数据仍需进一步改进。