(27 Jul 2026) Research security screening checks author affiliations against lists of organizations of concern, using bibliometric data. Affiliation matching is imperfect, though, especially for companies and small institutes with short names or no ROR record, so a researcher can end up linked to an organization they have no connection to. As a first pass we cross-referenced the major watch lists to ROR and cleaned up 6,191 such over-merges across 192 listed organizations. We [OpenAlex] invite the research security community to collaborate with us to improve OpenAlex and use bibliometric data responsibly for this use case.
“We took the published watch lists that screening actually runs against (Canada’s Named Research Organizations, the US Department of Defense 1260H list, the US Consolidated Screening List including the BIS Entity List, US OFAC, the US UFLPA list, the UK FCDO sanctions list, and Australia’s DFAT list) and cross-referenced each entity to ROR with a strict country-consistency check. That produced a verified crosswalk of 192 organizations covering roughly 4.24 million works.
Then, for each organization, we screened every affiliation string linked to it, about 2.5 million in all, looking for this specific failure: an unrelated company or institution absorbed into a listed entity because their names collide (often with an organization lacking a ROR record). We found 6,191 such over-merges, roughly a quarter of one percent of those strings, and we submitted manual curations to remove the linkages. The scale of the collision problem is easier to see in a few real examples than to describe.”
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