Citations to the “Introduction to informetrics” indexed by WOS,Scopus and Google Scholar

Google Scholar and Scopus are recent rivals to Web of Science. In this paper we examined these three citation databases through the citations of the book “Introduction to informetrics” by Leo Egghe and Ronald Rousseau. Scopus citations are comparable to Web of Science citations when limiting the citation period to 1996 and onwards (the citation coverage of Scopus)—each database covered about 90% of the citations located by the other. Google Scholar missed about 30% of the citations covered by Scopus and Web of Science (90 citations), but another 108 citations located by Google Scholar were not covered either by Scopus or by Web of Science. Google Scholar performed considerably better than reported in previous studies, however Google Scholar is not very “user-friendly” as a bibliometric data collection tool at this point in time. Such “microscopic” analysis of the citing documents retrieved by each of the citation databases allows us a deeper understanding of the similarities and the differences between the databases.     

Web of Science with the Conference Proceedings Citation Indexes: the case of computer science

Google Scholar and Scopus are recent rivals to Web of Science. In this paper we examined these three citation databases through the citations of the book “Introduction to informetrics” by Leo Egghe and Ronald Rousseau. Scopus citations are comparable to Web of Science citations when limiting the citation period to 1996 and onwards (the citation coverage of Scopus)—each database covered about 90% of the citations located by the other. Google Scholar missed about 30% of the citations covered by Scopus and Web of Science (90 citations), but another 108 citations located by Google Scholar were not covered either by Scopus or by Web of Science. Google Scholar performed considerably better than reported in previous studies, however Google Scholar is not very “user-friendly” as a bibliometric data collection tool at this point in time. Such “microscopic” analysis of the citing documents retrieved by each of the citation databases allows us a deeper understanding of the similarities and the differences between the databases.     

Is Google Scholar useful for bibliometrics? A webometric analysis

Google Scholar, the academic bibliographic database provided free-of-charge by the search engine giant Google, has been suggested as an alternative or complementary resource to the commercial citation databases like Web of Knowledge (ISI/Thomson) or Scopus (Elsevier). In order to check the usefulness of this database for bibliometric analysis, and especially research evaluation, a novel approach is introduced. Instead of names of authors or institutions, a webometric analysis of academic web domains is performed. The bibliographic records for 225 top level web domains (TLD), 19,240 university and 6,380 research centres institutional web domains have been collected from the Google Scholar database. About 63.8% of the records are hosted in generic domains like .com or .org, confirming that most of the Scholar data come from large commercial or non-profit sources. Considering only institutions with at least one record, one-third of the other items (10.6% from the global) are hosted by the 10,442 universities, while 3,901 research centres amount for an additional 7.9% from the total. The individual analysis show that universities from China, Brazil, Spain, Taiwan or Indonesia are far better ranked than expected. In some cases, large international or national databases, or repositories are responsible for the high numbers found. However, in many others, the local contents, including papers in low impact journals, popular scientific literature, and unpublished reports or teaching supporting materials are clearly overrepresented. Google Scholar lacks the quality control needed for its use as a bibliometric tool; the larger coverage it provides consists in some cases of items not comparable with those provided by other similar databases.     

Citation analysis with microsoft academic

In this article, we compare publication and citation coverage of the new Microsoft Academic with all other major sources for bibliometric data: Google Scholar, Scopus, and the Web of Science, using a sample of 145 academics in five broad disciplinary areas: Life Sciences, Sciences, Engineering, Social Sciences, and Humanities. When using the more conservative linked citation counts for Microsoft Academic, this data-source provides higher citation counts than both Scopus and the Web of Science for Engineering, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities, whereas citation counts for the Life Sciences and the Sciences are fairly similar across these three databases. Google Scholar still reports the highest citation counts for all disciplines. When using the more liberal estimated citation counts for Microsoft Academic, its average citations counts are higher than both Scopus and the Web of Science for all disciplines. For the Life Sciences, Microsoft Academic estimated citation counts are higher even than Google Scholar counts, whereas for the Sciences they are almost identical. For Engineering, Microsoft Academic estimated citation counts are 14% lower than Google Scholar citation counts, whereas for the Social Sciences this is 23%. Only for the Humanities are they substantially (69%) lower than Google Scholar citations counts. Overall, this first large-scale comparative study suggests that the new incarnation of Microsoft Academic presents us with an excellent alternative for citation analysis. We therefore conclude that the Microsoft Academic Phoenix is undeniably growing wings; it might be ready to fly off and start its adult life in the field of research evaluation soon.

     

Sources of Google Scholar citations outside the Science Citation Index: A comparison between four science disciplines

For practical reasons, bibliographic databases can only contain a subset of the scientific literature. The ISI citation databases are designed to cover the highest impact scientific research journals as well as a few other sources chosen by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Google Scholar also contains citation information, but includes a less quality controlled collection of publications from different types of web documents. We define Google Scholar unique citations as those retrieved by Google Scholar which are not in the ISI database. We took a sample of 882 articles from 39 open access ISI-indexed journals in 2001 from biology, chemistry, physics and computing and classified the type, language, publication year and accessibility of the Google Scholar unique citing sources. The majority of Google Scholar unique citations (70%) were from full-text sources and there were large disciplinary differences between types of citing documents, suggesting that a wide range of non-ISI citing sources, especially from non-journal documents, are accessible by Google Scholar. This might be considered to be an advantage of Google Scholar, since it could be useful for citation tracking in a wider range of open access scholarly documents and to give a broader type of citation impact. An important corollary from our study is that Google Scholar’s wider coverage of Open Access (OA) web documents is likely to give a boost to the impact of OA research and the OA movement.     

The effect of database dirty data on h-index calculation

As all databases, the bibliometric ones (e.g. Scopus, Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar) are not exempt from errors, such as missing or wrong records, which may obviously affect publication/citation statistics and—more in general—the resulting bibliometric indicators. This paper tries to answer to the question “What is the effect of database uncertainty on the evaluation of the h-index?”, breaking the paradigm of deterministic database analysis and treating responses to database queries as random variables. Precisely an informetric model of the h-index is used to quantify the variability of this indicator with respect to the variability stemming from errors in database records. Some preliminary results are presented and discussed.     

Comparison of self-citation patterns in WoS and Scopus databases based on national scientific production in Slovenia (1996–2020)

Scientometrics - Comparative studies of Web of Science and Scopus databases relate mainly to journal coverage and citation indicators. The aim of this study is to compare self-citation patterns in...     

Systematic analysis of coverage and usage of conference proceedings in web of science

The role of conference proceedings for scientific communication varies among the different research fields. It is thus difficult to determine how to use them in bibliometric studies that cover all or at least a variety of the research fields without favouring or penalizing observation subjects that are specialized in fields that rely heavily on conference proceedings. Also, the coverage of conference proceedings in bibliometric databases is often unclear. Not only have there been reports of misclassification but also of insufficient coverage. In this study, the Web of Science is used to give an overview of coverage of conference proceedings as well as advantages and pitfalls of their usage in bibliometric analyses. In particular, the focus lies on different citation behaviour of and for conference proceedings and the implications for bibliometric indicators. This is complemented by an investigation of the development of coverage and publication behaviour in conference proceedings which is compared to those of journal publications. Finally, the importance but also drawbacks and opportunities of acknowledging conference proceedings publications for bibliometric studies are summarized.     

Which role do non-source items play in the social sciences? A case study in political science in Germany

Publications that are not indexed by citation indices such as Web of Science (WoS) or Scopus are called “non-source items”. These have so far been neglected by most bibliometric analyses. The central issue of this study is to investigate the characteristics of non-source items and the effect of their inclusion in bibliometric evaluations in the social sciences, specifically German political science publications. The results of this study show that non-source items significantly increase the number of publications (+1,350 %) and to a lesser extent the number of citations from SCIE, SSCI, and A&HCI (+150 %) for evaluated political scientists. 42 % of non-source items are published as book chapters. Edited books and books are cited the most among non-source items. About 40 % of non-source items are in English, while 80 % of source items are in English. The citation rates of researchers taking non-source items into account are lower than those from source items, partially as a result of the limited coverage of WoS. In contrast, the H-indices of researchers taking only non-source items into account are higher than those from source items. In short, the results of this study show that non-source items should be included in bibliometric evaluations, regardless of their impact or the citations from them. The demand for a more comprehensive coverage of bibliometric database in the social sciences for a higher quality of evaluations is shown.     

Intellectual activities and influences of Belver C. Griffith: A citation perspective

Based on an analysis of the 377 documents that cited Griffith's publications in the ISI citation databases, it has been found that Griffith made pioneer and significant contributions with his collaborators to the fields of bibliometrics and scholarly communication among scientists. His research work has also greatly influenced people from all over the world conducting research in psychology, bibliometric information science, and social studies of science in the past several decades. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Evaluating research: from informed peer review to bibliometrics

National research assessment exercises are becoming regular events in ever more countries. The present work contrasts the peer-review and bibliometrics approaches in the conduct of these exercises. The comparison is conducted in terms of the essential parameters of any measurement system: accuracy, robustness, validity, functionality, time and costs. Empirical evidence shows that for the natural and formal sciences, the bibliometric methodology is by far preferable to peer-review. Setting up national databases of publications by individual authors, derived from Web of Science or Scopus databases, would allow much better, cheaper and more frequent national research assessments.     

The unification of institutional addresses applying parametrized finite-state graphs (P-FSG)

We propose a semi-automatic method based on finite-state techniques for the unification of corporate source data, with potential applications for bibliometric purposes. Bibliographic and citation databases have a well-known problem of inconsistency in the data at micro-level and meso-level, affecting the quality of bibliometric searches and the evaluation of research performance. The unification method applies parametrized finite-state graphs (P-FSG) and involves three stages: (1) breaking of corporate source data in independent units of analysis; (2) creation of binary matrices; and (3) drawing finite-state graphs. This procedure was tested on university departmental addresses, downloaded from the ISI Web of Science. Evaluation was in terms of an adaptation of the measures of precision and recall. The results demonstrate the usefulness of this approach, though it requires some human processing.     

Correlation between quality and quantity in scientific production: A case study of Iranian organizations from 1997 to 2006

In order to prevent the formation of a gap between the quality and quantity in Iranian scientific publications, this study makes an effort to analyze Iranian scientific publications indexed on the ISI Web of Science database using quantitative and qualitative scientometrics criteria over a ten year period. As a first step, all Iranian institutes were divided into three categories; universities, research institutes and other organizations. Then they were compared according to quantitative and qualitative criteria. Second, the correlation between the quality and quantity of the publications was measured. The research findings indicated that, according to qualitative criteria (citation, citation impact and percentage of cited documents) there are no meaningful differences among the three groups, while regarding quantitative criterion(number of papers), universities rank higher than the other two groups. The results also indicated that there is a positive and meaningful correlation among qualitative and quantitative criteria in the scholarly scientific publications conducted by Iranian organizations. In other words, in Iranian organizations the quality of publications increases as their quantity increases. The comparison of magnitude of correlation between these two criteria in the three categories reveals the fact that the correlation between number of papers and citations criterion in research institutes is stronger than the other two groups.     

Comparing Google Scholar and ISI Web of Science for Earth Sciences

In order to measure the degree to which Google Scholar can compete with bibliographical databases, search results from this database is compared with Thomson’s ISI WoS (Institute for Scientific Information, Web of Science). For earth science literature 85% of documents indexed by ISI WoS were recalled by Google Scholar. The rank of records displayed in Google Scholar and ISI WoS, is compared by means of Spearman’s footrule. For impact measures the h-index is investigated. Similarities in measures were significant for the two sources.     

LIS journals scientific impact and subject categorization: a comparison between Web of Science and Scopus

The study compares the coverage, ranking, impact and subject categorization of Library and Information Science journals, specifically, 79 titles based on data from Web of Science (WoS) and 128 titles from Scopus. Comparisons were made based on prestige factor scores reported in 2010 Journal Citation Reports and SCImago Journal Rank 2010 and noting the change in ranking when the differences are calculated. The rank normalized impact factor and the Library of Congress Classification System were used to compare impact rankings and subject categorization. There was high degree of similarity in rank normalized impact factor of titles in both WoS and Scopus databases. The searches found 162 journals, with 45 journals appearing in both databases. The rankings obtained for normalized impact scores confirm higher impact scores for titles covered in Scopus because of its larger coverage of titles. There was mismatch of subject categorization among 34 journal titles in both databases and 22 of the titles were not classified under Z subject headings in the Library of Congress catalogue. The results revealed the changes in journal title rankings when normalized, and the categorization of some journal titles in these databases might be incorrect.     

Bibliometric Analysis of Physics in Catalonia: Towards Quality Consolidation?

This paper studies the main bibliometric figures in order to analyse the "states of the art" and the evolution of research in physics in Catalonia (Spain) between 1981 and 1998 via the National Citation Report (NCR) for Catalonia elaborated by ISI (Institute for Scientific Information). The main indicators and parameters used are: bibliometric size, rate of citation, citedness of papers, concentration of scientific categories, journals and types of paper, index of immediacy, international collaboration, and papers and citation distribution by research centres and universities.     

From indexation policies through citation networks to normalized citation impacts: Web of Science,Scopus, and Dimensions as varying resonance chambers

Scientometrics - Dimensions was introduced as an alternative bibliometric database to the well-established Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, however all three databases have fundamental differences...     

The difficulty of achieving full coverage of international social science literature and the bibliometric consequences

This review of social science bibliometric literature seeks to establish characteristics of the social science literature and to understand their consequences for the coverage of literature databases and for interpretation of bibliometric social science indicators based on such databases. The paper reviews what we know about social science publishing and database coverage of it. It examines the main reasons why social science bibliometrics are problematic, namely: the centrality of books in social science literature and their high citation rate; and the national orientation of social science literatures. The paper then looks at reasons why social science bibliometrics holds increasing promise, namely: increasing internationalization; and good coverage of scholarly journals.