# Sources

ScholarIQ holds no proprietary data. Everything on the site is public scholarly metadata, and every record keeps the upstream identifiers needed to check it against its source.

## Primary source

The corpus is built principally from [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org), an open catalogue of scholarly works, authors, institutions, venues and topics run by OurResearch. OpenAlex releases its data into the public domain under [CC0](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/), which is what makes a site like this possible.

Where a record carries identifiers into other registries, we keep them and link out rather than copying those registries' own content.

## Identifiers on our pages

| Identifier | Used for |
| --- | --- |
| [OpenAlex ID](https://openalex.org) | The primary key for every record on this site |
| [DOI](https://www.doi.org) | Papers — resolved through doi.org |
| [PMID](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) | Biomedical papers indexed in PubMed |
| [ORCID](https://orcid.org) | Researchers, where the source carries one |
| [ROR](https://ror.org) | Institutions — the Research Organization Registry |
| [ISSN](https://www.issn.org) | Journals |
| [Wikidata](https://www.wikidata.org) | Institutions and topics, where linked upstream |

## Freshness

The corpus is a snapshot, not a live mirror. It is refreshed in batches, so a very recent paper or a just-changed affiliation may not be here yet. Where a page states a figure, that figure is as of the last refresh — the source is always more current than we are, which is why every record links back to it.

## Attribution and reuse

If you use figures from this site, cite the underlying source rather than us: the numbers are OpenAlex's, and the identifiers let you pull them directly. Our [methodology](/methodology/) explains which figures are upstream totals and which are computed over the subset shown on a page — the distinction matters if you plan to quote them.