Web of Science and Scopus are two world-leading and competing citation databases. By using the Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, this paper conducts a comparative, dynamic, and empirical study focusing on the use of Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus in academic papers published during 2004 and 2018. This brief communication reveals that although both Web of Science and Scopus are increasingly used in academic papers, Scopus as a new-comer is really challenging the dominating role of WoS. Researchers from more and more countries/regions and knowledge domains are involved in the use of these two databases. Even though the main producers of related papers are developed economies, some developing economies such as China, Brazil and Iran also act important roles but with different patterns in the use of these two databases. Both two databases are widely used in meta-analysis related studies especially for researchers in China. Health/medical science related domains and the traditional Information Science & Library Science field stand out in the use of citation databases.
Microsoft Academic is a free citation index that allows large scale data collection. This combination makes it useful for scientometric research. Previous studies have found that its citation counts tend to be slightly larger than those of Scopus but smaller than Google Scholar, with disciplinary variations. This study reports the largest and most systematic analysis so far, of 172,752 articles in 29 large journals chosen from different specialisms. From Scopus citation counts, Microsoft Academic citation counts and Mendeley reader counts for articles published 2007-2017, Microsoft Academic fo…
New sources of citation data have recently become available, such as Microsoft Academic, Dimensions, and the OpenCitations Index of CrossRef open DOI-to-DOI citations (COCI). Although these have been compared to the Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, or Google Scholar, there is no systematic evidence of their differences across subject categories. In response, this paper investigates 3,073,351 citations found by these six data sources to 2,515 English-language highly-cited documents published in 2006 from 252 subject categories, expanding and updating the largest previous study. Google Scholar foun…
We present a large-scale comparison of five multidisciplinary bibliographic data sources: Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic. The comparison considers scientific documents from the period 2008-2017 covered by these data sources. Scopus is compared in a pairwise manner with each of the other data sources. We first analyze differences between the data sources in the coverage of documents, focusing for instance on differences over time, differences per document type, and differences per discipline. We then study differences in the completeness and accuracy of cit…
Many journals post accepted articles online before they are formally published in an issue. Early citation impact evidence for these articles could be helpful for timely research evaluation and to identify potentially important articles that quickly attract many citations. This article investigates whether Microsoft Academic can help with this task. For over 65,000 Scopus in-press articles from 2016 and 2017 across 26 fields, Microsoft Academic found 2-5 times as many citations as Scopus, depending on year and field. From manual checks of 1,122 Microsoft Academic citations not found in Scopus,…
Research managers benchmarking universities against international peers face the problem of affiliation disambiguation. Different databases have taken separate approaches to this problem and discrepancies exist between them. Bibliometric data sources typically conduct a disambiguation process that unifies variant institutional names and those of its sub-units so that researchers can then search all records from that institution using a single unified name. This study examined affiliation discrepancies between Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, and Microsoft Academic for 18 Arab universities o…
Nowadays, the worlds scientific community has been publishing an enormous number of papers in different scientific fields. In such environment, it is essential to know which databases are equally efficient and objective for literature searches. It seems that two most extensive databases are Web of Science and Scopus. Besides searching the literature, these two databases used to rank journals in terms of their productivity and the total citations received to indicate the journals impact, prestige or influence. This article attempts to provide a comprehensive comparison of these databases to ans…
Microsoft Academic is a free academic search engine and citation index that is similar to Google Scholar but can be automatically queried. Its data is potentially useful for bibliometric analysis if it is possible to search effectively for individual journal articles. This article compares different methods to find journal articles in its index by searching for a combination of title, authors, publication year and journal name and uses the results for the widest published correlation analysis of Microsoft Academic citation counts for journal articles so far. Based on 126,312 articles from 323 …
This is the first detailed study on the coverage of Microsoft Academic (MA). Based on the complete and verified publication list of a university, the coverage of MA was assessed and compared with two benchmark databases, Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), on the level of individual publications. Citation counts were analyzed, and issues related to data retrieval and data quality were examined. A Perl script was written to retrieve metadata from MA based on publication titles. The script is freely available on GitHub. We find that MA covers journal articles, working papers, and conference items t…
We explore if and how Microsoft Academic (MA) could be used for bibliometric analyses. First, we examine the Academic Knowledge API (AK API), an interface to access MA data, and compare it to Google Scholar (GS). Second, we perform a comparative citation analysis of researchers by normalizing data from MA and Scopus. We find that MA offers structured and rich metadata, which facilitates data retrieval, handling and processing. In addition, the AK API allows retrieving frequency distributions of citations. We consider these features to be a major advantage of MA over GS. However, we identify fo…
In Ukraine, Scopus data are used to evaluate academics. Existing shortcomings in the Ukrainian evaluation system allow them to publish in titles that have been delisted from Scopus, and continue to use those papers as credible research output for evaluation. The purpose of this study was to analyse the publishing activity of Ukrainian institutions in Scopus-delisted titles (as of September 2021) in different fields between 2011 and 2020 and to attempt to appreciate how common this practice is among Ukrainian authors. Scopus was sourced to collect bibliographic and citations-related data, while…
There are known gender imbalances in participation in scientific fields, from female dominance of nursing to male dominance of mathematics. It is not clear whether there is also a citation imbalance, with some claiming that male-authored research tends to be more cited. No previous study has assessed gender differences in the readers of academic research on a large scale, however. In response, this article assesses whether there are gender differences in the average citations and/or Mendeley readers of academic publications. Field normalised logged Scopus citations and Mendeley readers from mi…
Research collaboration is promoted by governments and research funders but if the relative prevalence and merits of collaboration vary internationally different national and disciplinary strategies may be needed to promote it. This study compares the team size and field normalised citation impact of research across all 27 Scopus broad fields in the ten countries with the most journal articles indexed in Scopus 2008-2012. The results show that team size varies substantially by discipline and country, with Japan (4.2) having two thirds more authors per article than the UK (2.5). Solo authorship …
The purpose of this study is to ascertain the suitability of GS's url-based method as a valid approximation of universities' academic output measures, taking into account three aspects (retroactive growth, correlation, and coverage). To do this, a set of 100 Turkish universities were selected as a case study. The productivity in Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and GS (2000 to 2013) were captured in two different measurement iterations (2014 and 2018). In addition, a total of 18,174 documents published by a subset of 14 research-focused universities were retrieved from WoS, verifying their presenc…
Within academia, mature researchers tend to be more senior, but do they also tend to write higher impact articles? This article assesses long-term publishing (16+ years) United States (US) researchers, contrasting them with shorter-term publishing researchers (1, 6 or 10 years). A long-term US researcher is operationalised as having a first Scopus-indexed journal article in exactly 2001 and one in 2016-2019, with US main affiliations in their first and last articles. Researchers publishing in large teams (11+ authors) were excluded. The average field and year normalised citation impact of long…
Academic institutions, federal agencies, publishers, editors, authors, and librarians increasingly rely on citation analysis for making hiring, promotion, tenure, funding, and/or reviewer and journal evaluation and selection decisions. The Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) citation databases have been used for decades as a starting point and often as the only tools for locating citations and/or conducting citation analyses. ISI databases (or Web of Science), however, may no longer be adequate as the only or even the main sources of citations because new databases and tools that allo…
The objective of this article is to describe the academic impact, the editorial process quality, and the editorial and visibility strategies of Bibliotecas. Anales de Investigacion (BAI), a scientific Cuban journal edited by National Library of Cuba Jose Marti. The academic impact is determined through a citation analysis, which considers Google Scholar database as reference source. The bibliometric indicators applied are: citation per year, citation vs. self-citation, citable journals vs. non-citable documents, Hirsch Index, and impact factor. The editorial process quality and the visibility …
This study measures the tendency to publish in international scientific journals. For each of nearly 35 thousands Scopus-indexed journals, we derive seven globalization indicators based on the composition of authors by country of origin and other characteristics. These are subsequently scaled up to the level of 174 countries and 27 disciplines between 2005 and 2017. The results indicate that advanced countries maintain high globalization of scientific communication that is not varying across disciplines. Social sciences and health sciences are less globalized than physical and life sciences. C…
Bornmann, Stefaner, de Moya Anegon, and Mutz (in press) have introduced a web application (www.excellencemapping.net) which is linked to both academic ranking lists published hitherto (e.g. the Academic Ranking of World Universities) as well as spatial visualization approaches. The web application visualizes institutional performance within specific subject areas as ranking lists and on custom tile-based maps. The new, substantially enhanced version of the web application and the multilevel logistic regression on which it is based are described in this paper. Scopus data were used which have b…
With the rise of Wikipedia as a first-stop source for scientific knowledge, it is important to compare its representation of that knowledge to that of the academic literature. Here we identify the 250 most heavily used journals in each of 26 research fields (4,721 journals, 19.4M articles in total) indexed by the Scopus database, and test whether topic, academic status, and accessibility make articles from these journals more or less likely to be referenced on Wikipedia. We find that a journal's academic status (impact factor) and accessibility (open access policy) both strongly increase the p…
What Large-Scale Publication and Citation Data Tell Us About International Research Collaboration in Europe: Changing National Patterns in Global Contexts
F1000 recommendations have been validated as a potential data source for research evaluation, but reasons for differences between F1000 Article Factor (FFa scores) and citations remain to be explored. By linking 28254 publications in F1000 to citations in Scopus, we investigated the effect of research level and article type on the internal consistency of assessments based on citations and FFa scores. It turns out that research level has little impact, while article type has big effect on the differences. These two measures are significantly different for two groups: non-primary research or evi…
Growth of science is a prevalent issue in science of science studies. In recent years, two new bibliographic databases have been introduced which can be used to study growth processes in science from centuries back: Dimensions from Digital Science and Microsoft Academic. In this study, we used publication data from these new databases and added publication data from two established databases (Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics and Scopus from Elsevier) to investigate scientific growth processes from the beginning of the modern science system until today. We estimated regression models tha…
The policy debate around researchers' geographic mobility has been moving away from a theorized zero-sum game in which countries can be winners (brain gain) or losers (brain drain), and toward the concept of brain circulation, which implies that researchers move in and out of countries and everyone benefits. Quantifying trends in researchers' movements is key to understanding the drivers of the mobility of talent, as well as the implications of these patterns for the global system of science, and for the competitive advantages of individual countries. Existing studies have investigated bilater…
