Traditionally, Web of Science and Scopus have been the two most widely used databases for bibliometric analyses. However, during the last few years some new scholarly databases, such as Dimensions, have come up. Several previous studies have compared different databases, either through a direct comparison of article coverage or by comparing the citations across the databases. This article attempts to compare the journal coverage of the three databases: Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions. The most recent master journal lists of the three databases have been used for the purpose of identifying the overlapping and unique journals covered in the databases. The results indicate that the databases have significantly different journal coverage, with the Web of Science being most selective and Dimensions being the most exhaustive. About 99.11% and 96.61% of the journals indexed in Web of Science are also indexed in Scopus and Dimensions, respectively. Scopus has 96.42% of its indexed journals also covered by Dimensions. Dimensions database has the most exhaustive coverage, with 82.22% more journals covered as compared to Web of Science and 48.17% more journals covered as compared to Scopus. We also analysed the research outputs for 20 highly productive countries for the 2010-2019 period, as indexed in the three databases, and identified database-induced variations in research output volume, rank and global share of different countries. In addition to variations in overall coverage of research output from different countries, the three databases appear to have differential coverage of different disciplines.
We compare the network of aggregated journal-journal citation relations provided by the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2012 of the Science and Social Science Citation Indexes (SCI and SSCI) with similar data based on Scopus 2012. First, global maps were developed for the two sets separately; sets of documents can then be compared using overlays to both maps. Using fuzzy-string matching and ISSN numbers, we were able to match 10,524 journal names between the two sets; that is, 96.4% of the 10,936 journals contained in JCR or 51.2% of the 20,554 journals covered by Scopus. Network analysis was t…
Using Scopus data, we construct a global map of science based on aggregated journal-journal citations from 1996-2012 (N of journals = 20,554). This base map enables users to overlay downloads from Scopus interactively. Using a single year (e.g., 2012), results can be compared with mappings based on the Journal Citation Reports at the Web-of-Science (N = 10,936). The Scopus maps are more detailed at both the local and global levels because of their greater coverage, including, for example, the arts and humanities. The base maps can be interactively overlaid with journal distributions in sets do…
Journal classification systems play an important role in bibliometric analyses. The two most important bibliographic databases, Web of Science and Scopus, each provide a journal classification system. However, no study has systematically investigated the accuracy of these classification systems. To examine and compare the accuracy of journal classification systems, we define two criteria on the basis of direct citation relations between journals and categories. We use Criterion I to select journals that have weak connections with their assigned categories, and we use Criterion II to identify j…
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…
Bibliometric methods are used in multiple fields for a variety of purposes, namely for research evaluation. Most bibliometric analyses have in common their data sources: Thomson Reuters' Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier's Scopus. This research compares the journal coverage of both databases in terms of fields, countries and languages, using Ulrich's extensive periodical directory as a base for comparison. Results indicate that the use of either WoS or Scopus for research evaluation may introduces biases that favor Natural Sciences and Engineering as well as Biomedical Research to the detrimen…
An exploratory, descriptive analysis is presented of the national orientation of scientific, scholarly journals as reflected in the affiliations of publishing or citing authors. It calculates for journals covered in Scopus an Index of National Orientation (INO), and analyses the distribution of INO values across disciplines and countries, and the correlation between INO values and journal impact factors. The study did not find solid evidence that journal impact factors are good measures of journal internationality in terms of the geographical distribution of publishing or citing authors, as th…
In December 2016, after several years of development, Elsevier launched a set of transparent, comprehensive, current, and freely-available journal citation metrics called CiteScore metrics. Most of the CiteScore metrics are static, annual indicators calculated from the dynamic Scopus citation index. In the spirit of recent public statements on the responsible use of metrics, we outline the desirable characteristics of journal citation metrics, discuss how we decided on the cited and citing publications years and document types to be used for CiteScore metrics, and detail the precise method of …
The potential benefit of open access (OA) in relation to citation impact has been discussed in the literature in depth. The methodology used to test the OA citation advantage includes comparing OA vs. non-OA journal impact factors and citations of OA versus non-OA articles published in the same non-OA journals. However, one problem with many studies is that they are small -restricted to a discipline or set of journals-. Moreover, conclusions are not entirely consistent among research areas and 'early view' and 'selection bias' have been suggested as possible explications. In the present paper,…
Although bibliometrics are normally applied to journal articles when used to support research evaluations, conference papers are at least as important in fast-moving computing-related fields. It is therefore important to assess the relative advantages of citations and altmetrics for computing conference papers to make an informed decision about which, if any, to use. This paper compares Scopus citations with Mendeley reader counts for conference papers and journal articles that were published between 1996 and 2018 in 11 computing fields and had at least one US author. The data showed high corr…
A new methodology is proposed for comparing Google Scholar (GS) with other citation indexes. It focuses on the coverage and citation impact of sources, indexing speed, and data quality, including the effect of duplicate citation counts. The method compares GS with Elsevier's Scopus, and is applied to a limited set of articles published in 12 journals from six subject fields, so that its findings cannot be generalized to all journals or fields. The study is exploratory, and hypothesis generating rather than hypothesis-testing. It confirms findings on source coverage and citation impact obtained…
We present the results of a large-scale study of potentially predatory journals (PPJ) represented in the Scopus database, which is widely used for research evaluation. Both journal metrics and country, disciplinary data have been evaluated for different groups of PPJ: those listed by Jeffrey Beall and those delisted by Scopus because of "publication concerns". Our results show that even after years of delisting, PPJ are still highly visible in the Scopus database with hundreds of active potentially predatory journals. PPJ papers are continuously produced by all major countries, but with differ…
Journal classification into subject categories is an important aspect in scholarly research evaluation as well as in bibliometric analysis. However, this classification is not standardized, resulting in several different journal subject classification systems. In this study, we adopt a logical set theory-based definition of irregularities within a given classification system and discrepancies between systems and investigate their prevalence in the two most widely used indexing services of Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. In both systems, we identify unusually sized categories, high overlap and…
We present a large-scale analysis of the accuracy of citation data in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The analysis is based on citations given in publications in Elsevier journals. We reveal significant data quality problems for both databases. Missing and incorrect references are important problems in Web of Science. Duplicate publications are a serious problem in Scopus.
Colombian scientific journals are poorly represented in international digital libraries; however, through Google Scholar (GS) it is possible to determine their use by the community. Between the years of 2003 and 2007 a classification of 185 Colombian journals indexed in the Colombian National Bibliographical Index (IBNP) was performed using the information provided by GS, basing categorization on size indicators, indexation and citation. The indicators were analyzed by grouping the journals in two general areas: sciences and social sciences. In each area, the indicators provided by the digital…
Impact factors (and similar measures such as the Scimago Journal Rankings) suffer from two problems: (i) citation behavior varies among fields of science and therefore leads to systematic differences, and (ii) there are no statistics to inform us whether differences are significant. The recently introduced SNIP indicator of Scopus tries to remedy the first of these two problems, but a number of normalization decisions are involved which makes it impossible to test for significance. Using fractional counting of citations-based on the assumption that impact is proportionate to the number of refe…
Nationally oriented scientific-scholarly journals are considered from a methodological-informetric viewpoint, analysing data extracted from Scimago Journal Rank based on Scopus. An operational definition is proposed of a journal's degree of national orientation based on the geographical distribution of its publishing or citing authors, and the role of international collaboration and a country's total publication output. A comprehensive analysis is presented of trends up until 2019 in national orientation and citation impact of national journals entering Scopus, extending outcomes in earlier st…
Dimensions is a partly free scholarly database launched by Digital Science in January 2018. Dimensions includes journal articles and citation counts, making it a potential new source of impact data. This article explores the value of Dimensions from an impact assessment perspective with an examination of Food Science research 2008-2018 and a random sample of 10,000 Scopus articles from 2012. The results include high correlations between citation counts from Scopus and Dimensions (0.96 by narrow field in 2012) as well as similar average counts. Almost all Scopus articles with DOIs were found in…
Numerous indexing databases keep track of the number of publications, citations, etc. in order to maintain the progress of science and individual. However, the choice of journals and articles varies among these indexing databases, hence the number of citations and h-index varies. There is no common platform exists that can provide a single count for the number of publications, citations, h-index, etc. To overcome this limitation, we have proposed a weighted unified informetrics, named "conflate". The proposed system takes into account the input from multiple indexing databases and generates a …
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…
This paper proposes an indicator of journals' scientific prestige, the SJR indicator, for ranking scholarly journals based on citation weighting schemes and eigenvector centrality to be used in complex and heterogeneous citation networks such Scopus. Its computation methodology is described and the results after implementing the indicator over Scopus 2007 dataset are compared to an ad-hoc Journal Impact Factor both generally and inside specific scientific areas. The results showed that SJR indicator and JIF distributions fitted well to a power law distribution and that both metrics were strong…
In academia, the research performance of the faculty members is either evaluated by the number of publications or the number of citations. Most of the time h-index is widely used during the hiring process or the faculty performance evaluation. The calculation of the h-index is shown in various databases; however, there is no recent or systematic evidence about the differences between them. In this study, we compare the difference in the h-index compiled with Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) with the aim of analyzing the ranking of the authors within a university. We analyze the publication reco…
Despite citation counts from Google Scholar (GS), Web of Science (WoS), and Scopus being widely consulted by researchers and sometimes used in research evaluations, there is no recent or systematic evidence about the differences between them. In response, this paper investigates 2,448,055 citations to 2,299 English-language highly-cited documents from 252 GS subject categories published in 2006, comparing GS, the WoS Core Collection, and Scopus. GS consistently found the largest percentage of citations across all areas (93%-96%), far ahead of Scopus (35%-77%) and WoS (27%-73%). GS found nearly…
This paper is a reply to the article "Scopus's Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) versus a Journal Impact Factor based on Fractional Counting of Citations", published by Loet Leydesdorff and Tobias Opthof (arXiv:1004.3580v2 [cs.DL]). It clarifies the relationship between SNIP and Elsevier's Scopus. Since Leydesdorff and Opthof's description of SNIP is not complete, it indicates four key differences between SNIP and the indicator proposed by the two authors, and argues why the former is more valid than the latter. Nevertheless, the idea of fractional citation counting deserves further ex…
The overarching aim of this work is to provide a detailed description of the free version of Dimensions (new bibliographic database produced by Digital Science and launched in January 2018). To do this, the work is divided into two differentiated blocks. First, its characteristics, operation and features are described, focusing on its main strengths and weaknesses. Secondly, an analysis of its coverage is carried out (comparing it Scopus and Google Scholar) in order to determine whether the bibliometric indicators offered by Dimensions have an order of magnitude significant enough to be used. …
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…
This paper examines the citation impact of papers published in scientific-scholarly journals upon patentable technology, as reflected in examiner- or inventor-given references in granted patents. It analyses data created by SCImago Research Group, linking PATSTAT's scientific non-patent references (SNPRs) to source documents indexed in Scopus. The frequency of patent citations to journal papers is calculated per discipline, year, institutional sector, journal subject category, and for "top" journals. PATSTAT/Scopus-based statistics are compared to those derived from Web of Science/USPTO linkag…
The internationalization characteristics of two Malaysian journals, Bulletin of the Malaysian Mathematical Sciences Society (indexed by ISI) and the Malaysian Journal of Computer Science (indexed by Inspec and Scopus) is observed. All issues for the years 2000 to 2007 were looked at to obtain the following information, (i) total articles published between 2000 and 2007; (ii) the distribution of foreign and Malaysian authors publishing in the journals; (iii) the distribution of articles by country and (iv) the geographical distribution of authors citing articles published in the journals. Citat…
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 …
Current attempts to address the shortfall of female researchers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) have not yet succeeded despite other academic subjects having female majorities. This article investigates the extent to which gender disparities are subject-wide or nation-specific by a first author gender comparison of 30 million articles from all 27 Scopus broad fields within the 31 countries with the most Scopus-indexed articles 2014-18. The results show overall and geocultural patterns as well as individual national differences. Almost half of the subjects were always…
This study explores the extent to which bibliometric indicators based on counts of highly-cited documents could be affected by the choice of data source. The initial hypothesis is that databases that rely on journal selection criteria for their document coverage may not necessarily provide an accurate representation of highly-cited documents across all subject areas, while inclusive databases, which give each document the chance to stand on its own merits, might be better suited to identify highly-cited documents. To test this hypothesis, an analysis of 2,515 highly-cited documents published i…
Scientometric analysis of 146 and 59 research articles published in Indian journal of Information Sources and Services (IJISS) and Pakistan Journal of Library and Information Science has been carried out. Seven Volumes of the IJISS containing 14 issues and Seven volumes of PJLIS containing 8 issues from 2011 - 2017 have been taken into consideration for the present study. The number of contributions, authorship pattern & author productivity, average citations, average length of articles, average keywords and collaborative papers has been analyzed. Out of 146 of IJISS contributions, only 39 are…
China and Latin America (LATAM) are now key players in global research production. This study presents a comparative study on research on innovation in management and decision sciences based on data from Scopus and Web of Knowledge (WoS) between China and LATAM. Findings showed significant differences between regions regarding journals citation dependent measures, and between the number of authors and journal reputation, public universities have been leading producers, and China showed a particular interest in research topics such as commerce and industry, while LATAM in sustainable developmen…
Predatory journals are Open Access journals of highly questionable scientific quality. Such journals pretend to use peer review for quality assurance, and spam academics with requests for submissions, in order to collect author payments. In recent years predatory journals have received a lot of negative media. While much has been said about the harm that such journals cause to academic publishing in general, an overlooked aspect is how much articles in such journals are actually read and in particular cited, that is if they have any significant impact on the research in their fields. Other stu…
It is shown that the calculation of scientometric indicators of the scientist and also the scientific journal continues to be an actual problem nowadays. It is revealed that the leading scientometric databases have the capabilities of automated metadata collection from the scientific journal website by the use of specialized electronic document management systems, in particular Open Journal Systems. It is established that Open Journal Systems successfully exports metadata about an article from scientific journals to scientometric databases Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar. However, th…
The present study aims to establish a valid method by which to apply the theory of co-citations to Wikipedia article references and, subsequently, to map these relationships between scientific papers. This theory, originally applied to scientific literature, will be transferred to the digital environment of collective knowledge generation. To this end, a dataset containing Wikipedia references collected from Altmetric and Scopus' Journal Metrics journals has been used. The articles have been categorized according to the disciplines and specialties established in the All Science Journal Classif…
Symbiosis Institute of Technology (SIT), Symbiosis International (Deemed University)（共生国际（被视为大学）共生技术学院（SIT））
Cohort Intelligence or CI is one of its kind of novel optimization algorithm. Since its inception, in a very short span it is applied successfully in various domains and its results are observed to be effectual in contrast to algorithm of its kind. Till date, there is no such type of bibliometric analysis carried out on CI and its related applications. So, this research paper in a way will be an ice breaker for those who want to take up CI to a new level. In this research papers, CI publications available in Scopus are analyzed through graphs, networked diagrams about authors, source titles, k…
We study the statistics of citations made to the indexed Science journals in the Journal Citation Reports during the period 2004-2013 using different measures. We consider different measures which quantify the impact of the journals. To our surprise, we find that the apparently uncorrelated measures, even when defined in an arbitrary manner, show strong correlations. This is checked over all the years considered. Impact factor being one of these measures, the present work raises the question whether it is actually a nearly perfect index as claimed often. In addition we study the distributions …
This study provides an overview of science from the Wikipedia perspective. A methodology has been established for the analysis of how Wikipedia editors regard science through their references to scientific papers. The method of co-citation has been adapted to this context in order to generate Pathfinder networks (PFNET) that highlight the most relevant scientific journals and categories, and their interactions in order to find out how scientific literature is consumed through this open encyclopaedia. In addition to this, their obsolescence has been studied through Price index. A total of 1 433…
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 launching of Scopus and Google Scholar, and methodological developments in Social Network Analysis have made many more indicators for evaluating journals available than the traditional Impact Factor, Cited Half-life, and Immediacy Index of the ISI. In this study, these new indicators are compared with one another and with the older ones. Do the various indicators measure new dimensions of the citation networks, or are they highly correlated among them? Are they robust and relatively stable over time? Two main dimensions are distinguished -- size and impact -- which together shape influence…
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…
This article maps Library and Information Science (LIS) research in Indian universities. As the two prominent citation databases, Web of Science and Scopus have very limited coverage of Indian LIS journals, the publications generated by the library and science departments of about 114 selected Indian universities and the two national institutions of importance in LIS research were extracted from Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA). The relevant publication records were analyzed using scientometrics and Social Network Analysis (SNA) tools. The study traces the growth of …
The enlarged coverage of the international publication and citation databases Web of Science and Scopus towards local media in social sciences was a welcome response to an increased usage of these databases in evaluation and funding systems. The mostly international journals available earlier were the basis for the development of current standard bibliometric indicators. The same indicators may no longer measure exactly the same concepts when applied to newly introduced or extended media categories, with possibly different characteristics than those of international journals. This paper invest…
