Japan's Research Output: 4 Million Records, Deduplicated from 5.45 Million, Published in Global Database (National Institute of Informatics)

Explanation

The National Institute of Informatics (NII) announced on August 18, 2026, that it has linked IRDB, a database that aggregates research output published by universities and research institutions in Japan, with OpenAlex, a US-based academic information database.

Of the approximately 5.45 million records held by IRDB, after processing to consolidate duplicate data and improve quality, metadata for approximately 4 million research outputs was, as of August 18, 2026, freely available worldwide through OpenAlex. The metadata used conforms to a common format called "JPCOAR Schema Version 2.0."

OpenAlex is an academic infrastructure that provides machine-readable data through an API, and is also used for AI-based analysis of research data. This collaboration is expected to make research output such as papers published by Japanese universities and research institutions easier to find for overseas researchers and search services.