The MovieLens Datasets

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

The MovieLens datasets are widely used in education, research, and industry. They are downloaded hundreds of thousands of times each year, reflecting their use in popular press programming books, traditional and online courses, and software. These datasets are a product of member activity in the MovieLens movie recommendation system, an active research platform that has hosted many experiments since its launch in 1997. This article documents the history of MovieLens and the MovieLens datasets. We include a discussion of lessons learned from running a long-standing, live research platform from the perspective of a research organization. We document best practices and limitations of using the MovieLens datasets in new research.