Counts by publication year
Welcome to the KB information portal of the Kompetenznetzwerk Bibliometrie (KB). This portal provides an interactive exploration of the OpenAlex database, which is integrated into the KB data infrastructure (Schmidt et al. 2025).
Bibliometric data is an important resource for understanding science and research. It helps reveal patterns of knowledge production, collaboration, and dissemination that would otherwise remain hidden. Policymakers use bibliometrics to monitor research trends, institutions use it for evaluation and strategy, and researchers can reflect on how their fields are represented and recognized. At the same time, bibliometric databases never offers a complete picture. Databases differ in coverage, structure, and focus, which influences the picture they show about research.
OpenAlex is one of the largest openly available bibliometric databases, covering scholarly works, authors, institutions, journals, publishers, and funders worldwide. Unlike commercial databases, it is free and transparent, making it a valuable foundation for open and reproducible analyses. Within KB, OpenAlex is used both as a research object and as a practical infrastructure component. The KB enriches and adapts the data with its expertise, especially in the context of the German science system, to make the information more accurate and useful.
This dashboard allows users to explore OpenAlex data across multiple perspectives. By making complex structures visible, it aims to support both specialists and non-specialists in interpreting trends, identifying biases, and understanding the diversity of scholarly communication.
The dashboard consists of six main pages, each offering a different perspective on the data:
Entities by Year This perspective shows trends in the number of items, journals, publishers, organizations, and authors over time - both in the entire database and among items affiliated with Germany. Growth in entities can reflect real structural changes in research, such as the emergence of new publishers, or the founding of new journals. However, it can also reveal changes in the database itself, as coverage and indexing practices evolve over time. For this reason, the dashboard also allows comparison across different snapshots of OpenAlex, with future snapshots to be added. This feature highlights how bibliometric databases are dynamic and continuously updated, which has important implications for longitudinal analyses.
Languages This perspective compares the number of items published in different languages. While English dominates international scholarly publishing, a vast amount of research is conducted and communicated in other languages. For example, research on local education policy in Germany, agricultural practices in Latin America, or public health studies in China may be published in German, Spanish, or Chinese rather than in English. Such work is highly relevant within its local or regional context but may remain invisible in global evaluations if only English-language publications are considered. This perspective underscores the importance of linguistic diversity for a more complete understanding of global scholarly communication.
Item Types Here, users can analyze the distribution of items across different publication types. Scientific knowledge is disseminated not only through journal articles but also through books, conference proceedings, datasets, and other outputs. Recognizing these forms is crucial: neglecting books disadvantages disciplines such as the humanities and social sciences, while ignoring datasets downplays open science practices, reproducibility, and important parts of scholarly work. This perspective highlights how different types of output contribute to the research ecosystem.
Research Fields This view presents the number of items categorized under OECD research fields, a widely used classification system that enables standardized comparison across databases. Such standardization is important because research fields differ in database coverage. Bibliometric databases have historically favored fields with strong journal cultures (such as medicine or physics), while disciplines with more localized or non-journal communication patterns (such as history, law, or education) remain underrepresented. By showing how OpenAlex covers different research fields, this perspective provides insight into disciplinary diversity of bibliometric data.
Research Fields in dynamics This page provides an opportunity to track a dynamics in different research field. This could be particularly interesting for the expert in these fields.
German Institutions Finally, this perspective allows users to compare the number of items affiliated with German institutions, using two different disambiguation procedures: the standard OpenAlex institutional ID and the KB I-Kodierung. Correctly attributing research outputs to institutions is a well-known challenge in global bibliometric systems. Inconsistent or incomplete affiliation data can lead to errors that misrepresent institutional output, for example by undercounting publications or wrongly attributing them to other organizations. Building on its expertise in the German science system, KB has developed improved methods for affiliation disambiguation (data is openly available). This ensures a more accurate and reliable representation of German institutions in bibliometric analyses.
A short description of what each indicator counts, and of the conventions that apply across all pages, is on the Methodology page.