Dataset: Unaffiliated Researchers' Publication Patterns, Career Trajectories, and Impact Metrics (2015-2024)

This dataset comprises bibliographic information and career trajectory data for researchers (and their co-authors) who have published in peer-reviewed sources without an affiliation as independent scholars. The data were extracted from OpenAlex and cover publications from 2015 to 2024. Data Sources OpenAlex (CC0-License), and secondarily, Web of Science's Journal Impact Factors (though the large-scale dataset with Impact Factors and ranking quartiles are not included due to copyright restrictions). File Contents author_history.tsv: Institutional trajectories for unaffiliated authors author_metrics.tsv: Bibliometric metrics for unaffiliated authors authors.tsv: Author information including affiliation status and career transitions bibliographic_data.tsv: Complete bibliographic metadata for all publications bibliographic_data_with_jif.tsv: Subset of bibliographic data for Web of Science-indexed works institutions_metrics.tsv: Bibliometric metrics for institutions institutions.tsv: Institutional affiliation data issn_pub_per_year.tsv: Publication counts by ISSN and year issn_pub_per_year_subset_with_jif.tsv: ISSN publication data for journals with JIF topics.tsv: Research topic classifications using OpenAlex taxonomy single_authored_doi.tsv: DOIs of single-authored papers by unaffiliated researchers single_authors.tsv: Author IDs of single-authored unaffiliated researchers Reading files (example) Here is an example of how the files can be read in R: library(readr) # Read all files AHI <- read_tsv("Data\\author_history.tsv") AUM <- read_tsv("Data\\author_metrics.tsv") AUT <- read_tsv("Data\\authors.tsv") DOI <- read_tsv("Data\\bibliographic_data.tsv") DOIjif <- read_tsv("Data\\bibliographic_data_with_jif.tsv") INB <- read_tsv("Data\\institutions_metrics.tsv") INS <- read_tsv("Data\\institutions.tsv") ISN <- read_tsv("Data\\issn_pub_per_year.tsv") ISNjif <- read_tsv("Data\\issn_pub_per_year_subset_with_jif.tsv") # JIF <- read_tsv("Data\\jif.tsv") TOP <- read_tsv("Data\\topics.tsv") # Read the vectors (these were saved as single-column dataframes) singledoi <- read_tsv("Data\\single_authored_doi.tsv") %>% pull(values) singleauthors <- read_tsv("Data\\single_authors.tsv") %>% pull(values)