Authors

Search researchers by name or ORCID — with citation metrics, affiliations and research fields from the open OpenAlex dataset (CC0).

What this directory covers, and what it does not. It holds 30,780,981 author records, every one of them with three or more published works — measured 19 September 2026 on the served table: not one record falls below that bar. 7,182,821 of them (23.3%) carry an ORCID. Until 19 September 2026 this directory held 7,369,024 records and said, correctly at the time, that it was not everyone who meets the three-work bar, the open dataset listing 30.8 million. The article and author layers moved to our own server that day and the rest of those authors came with them, so that gap is closed and the sentence has gone with it. What has not been re-measured is the other coverage figure: our journal–author graph now names 10,214,773 authors, while the figure we publish for how much of that graph has a profile behind it — 388,431 of 5,668,521 (6.9%) without one — comes from author_coverage_mv, which rebuilds weekly and has not run against the new tables yet. Read it as the last measurement of the old ones. Read an empty search result as “not in this directory”, never as “not a researcher”. The gap was 2,549,835 (45.0%) until 30 August 2026, when the author table was rebuilt against the expanded catalogue, and 637,224 — 21% — until 22 August, when it hid most of the best-cited researchers in the world. Fixed, and recorded as errata E23.

Sorted by h-index by default, and that default is deliberate. A very large citation count resting on a handful of works is the signature of one name absorbing the work of many researchers — an author-disambiguation failure in the upstream data, which we do not correct and cannot hide. Until 22 August those records held the top of the citation order outright: 14 of the top 20 had an h-index of 5 or lower. They no longer do, because the researchers who should have been above them were missing from this directory and now are not — the top 20 by citations today average an h-index of 198, and none is below 5. The same upstream failure has a second shape, though, and one of those is now near the top: a name absorbing many researchers can also show as a hundred thousand works under a two-letter name. The 30 August load brought in an “M. Shoji” with 100,008 works and an h-index of 38, third by citations. We show it rather than remove it. The older artefacts sit further down; the largest of them now ranks 63,984th by citations, in a seven-way tie. Both orders are worth reading, and neither is a ranking of people. Re-measured 2 September 2026 over all 7,369,024 records; this said 225 and 36,120, from the 22 August table, until then.

Source: OpenAlex authors dataset (CC0). Author records are algorithmically disambiguated by OpenAlex. The directory holds 30,780,981 author records, each with three or more works, and an ORCID on 7,182,821 of them (23.3%). It is not the most-cited researchers: it is everyone the source lists above the three-work bar, which since 19 September 2026 is the whole of that set rather than the 7,369,024 records drawn from our own journal–author graph before it. The notice at the top of this page records what is and is not measured on the new table. Spotted a wrong record? Tell us.