Frequently asked questions

Author Trends is a free tool that visualises year-by-year publication statistics for any researcher indexed in OpenAlex. Type a name, pick the right profile, and the page renders journals, co-authors, geography, citations, topics and integrity signals — all in your browser, no signup required.

OpenAlex is the underlying data source; we just render it as interactive charts. Compared to Google Scholar we focus on country, institution and concept trends, and we overlay integrity signals — Problematic Paper Screener flags, retractions, Scopus delisted venues. We also auto-merge duplicate OpenAlex profiles so a researcher whose works are split across two IDs sees one combined view.

The Problematic Paper Screener (PPS) is a community-maintained project by Cabanac, Labbé and Magazinov that flags suspect publications using detectors like tortured phrases, citation cartels, paper mills, and "feet of clay" citations to retracted literature. Author Trends joins each author's DOIs against the PPS dataset and shows the flag rate over time, the detector mix, and the flagged papers themselves. Detector signal strength (strong / medium / weak) is annotated in the Integrity tab.

Retractions are the union of two sources:

• Papers flagged by the PPS annulled detector (DOI-keyed, high precision).
• Papers whose OpenAlex record has is_retracted = true.

Each flagged paper shows which source(s) detected it. A purple "both" pill appears when both PPS and OpenAlex agree.

Author Trends filters out "isolated outlier" papers. A paper is excluded only if BOTH:

• It has no other paper within ±2 years (no neighbour cluster).
• The author has at least 3 more papers published more than 10 years afterwards (i.e. the real career starts later).

These almost always turn out to be misattributions in OpenAlex — a thesis cataloguing error, or someone else's paper accidentally linked to this author. The banner under the author's name tells you exactly how many papers were excluded.

OpenAlex sometimes splits the same researcher across multiple author IDs. We merge them when they share ≥ 2 name tokens of length ≥ 3, at least one institution, and at least one research concept — or when the ORCIDs match exactly. Full walkthrough with a worked example in the merging methodology blog post. Every merged card shows a purple chip and lists its source profiles.

Yes — the first viewer of a profile triggers a live fetch from OpenAlex (a few seconds for small profiles, longer for very prolific authors). The aggregated result is cached on our backend so subsequent visitors load it instantly. Every author page has a ⟳ Refresh button that forces a re-fetch when you need the latest.

Free, no signup, no paywall. Author Trends is an open-source side project from the same team that runs Journal Trends. There's no catch — it's a community resource. We hope you'll send feedback when something looks wrong.

Because it is one. The features are working but we're actively tuning the merge heuristic, the integrity-signal coverage, and the UI. If you spot a bug or want a feature, the Feedback link in the top nav goes straight to our form.

PubPeer is a post-publication review platform where researchers comment on published papers. The 🔎 PubPeer button on the selected-author banner runs a PubPeer search for that author's display name in a new tab — useful for sanity-checking whether any of their works have public concerns.

Yes. Every loaded profile lives at /?author=Axxx where Axxx is the OpenAlex author ID. Use the ⎘ Copy button on the banner to grab the URL. Opening that link in a new tab auto-loads the same view from cache.

Use the Feedback link in the top navigation. It goes to a Google Form where we read every entry.

If there are papers that you have not published wrongly in your profile, or if there are other OpenAlex profiles which contain your paper please contact OpenAlex directly to rectify it using this form.

Author Trends just renders what OpenAlex tells us, so attribution fixes have to happen upstream. If there are papers that you have not published wrongly in your profile, or if there are other OpenAlex profiles which contain your paper please contact OpenAlex directly to rectify it using this form. Once OpenAlex updates the record, hit the ⟳ Refresh button on the author page to pull the corrected data.