Comparing bibliometric statistics obtained from the Web of Science and Scopus

For more than 40 years, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, now part of Thomson Reuters) produced the only available bibliographic databases from which bibliometricians could compile large‐scale bibliometric indicators. ISI's citation indexes, now regrouped under the Web of Science (WoS), were the major sources of bibliometric data until 2004, when Scopus was launched by the publisher Reed Elsevier. For those who perform bibliometric analyses and comparisons of countries or institutions, the existence of these two major databases raises the important question of the comparability and stability of statistics obtained from different data sources. This paper uses macrolevel bibliometric indicators to compare results obtained from the WoS and Scopus. It shows that the correlations between the measures obtained with both databases for the number of papers and the number of citations received by countries, as well as for their ranks, are extremely high (R2 ≈ .99). There is also a very high correlation when countries' papers are broken down by field. The paper thus provides evidence that indicators of scientific production and citations at the country level are stable and largely independent of the database

A review of the literature on citation impact indicators

Citation impact indicators nowadays play an important role in research evaluation, and consequently these indicators have received a lot of attention in the bibliometric and scientometric literature. This paper provides an in-depth review of the literature on citation impact indicators. First, an overview is given of the literature on bibliographic databases that can be used to calculate citation impact indicators (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar). Next, selected topics in the literature on citation impact indicators are reviewed in detail. The first topic is the selection of publications and citations to be included in the calculation of citation impact indicators. The second topic is the normalization of citation impact indicators, in particular normalization for field differences. Counting methods for dealing with co-authored publications are the third topic, and citation impact indicators for journals are the last topic. The paper concludes by offering some recommendations for future research

Large-Scale Analysis of the Accuracy of the Journal Classification Systems of Web of Science and Scopus

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 journals that are not assigned to categories with which they have strong connections. If a journal satisfies either of the two criteria, we conclude that its assignment to categories may be questionable. Accordingly, we identify all journals with questionable classifications in Web of Science and Scopus. Furthermore, we perform a more in-depth analysis for the field of Library and Information Science to assess whether our proposed criteria are appropriate and whether they yield meaningful results. It turns out that according to our citation-based criteria Web of Science performs significantly better than Scopus in terms of the accuracy of its journal classification system

Benchmarking citation measures among the Australian education professoriate

Individual researchers and the organisations for which they work are interested in comparative measures of research performance for a variety of purposes. Such comparisons are facilitated by quantifiable measures that are easily obtained and offer convenience and a sense of objectivity. One popular measure is the Journal Impact Factor based on citation rates but it is a measure intended for journals rather than individuals. Moreover, educational research publications are not well represented in the databases most widely used for calculation of citation measures leading to doubts about the usefulness of such measures in education. Newer measures and data sources offer alternatives that provide wider representation of education research. However, research has shown that citation rates vary according to discipline and valid comparisons depend upon the availability of discipline specific benchmarks. This study sought to provide such benchmarks for Australian educational researchers based on analysis of citation measures obtained for the Australian education professoriate

Comparative Analysis of Web of Science and Scopus on the Energy Efficiency and Climate Impact of Buildings

Although the body of scientific publications on energy efficiency and climate mitigation from buildings has been growing quickly in recent years, very few previous bibliometric analysis studies exist that analyze the literature in terms of specific content (trends or options for zero‐energy buildings) or coverage of different scientific databases. We evaluate the scientific literature published since January 2013 concerning alternative methods for improving the energy efficiency and mitigating climate impacts from buildings. We quantify and describe the literature through a bibliometric approach, comparing the databases Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. A total of 19,416 (Scopus) and 17,468 (WoS) publications are analyzed, with only 11% common documents. The literature has grown steadily during this time period, with a peak in the year 2017. Most of the publications are in English, in the area of Engineering and Energy Fuels, and from institutions from China and the USA. Strong links are observed between the most published authors and institutions worldwide. An analysis of keywords reveals that most of research focuses on technologies for heating, ventilation, and air‐conditioning, phase change materials, as well as information and communication technologies. A significantly smaller segment of the literature takes a broader perspective (greenhouse gas emissions, life cycle, and sustainable development), investigating implementation issues (policies and costs) or renewable energy (solar). Knowledge gaps are detected in the areas of behavioral changes, the circular economy, and some renewable energy sources (geothermal, biomass, small wind). We conclude that i) the contents of WoS and Scopus are radically different in the studied fields; ii) research seems to focus on technological aspects; and iii) there are weak links between research on energy and on climate mitigation and sustainability, the latter themes being misrepresented in the literature. These conclusions should be validated with further analyses of the documents identified in this study. We recommend that future research focuses on filling the above identified gaps, assessing the contents of several scientific databases, and extending energy analyses to their effects in terms of mitigation potentials.This work was funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades de España (RTI2018‐ 093849‐B‐C31), by ICREA under the ICREA Academia programme, and by the foundation SIVL

The development of computer science research in the People's Republic of China 2000-2009: A bibliometric study

This paper reports a bibliometric study of the development of computer science research in the People's Republic of China in the 21st century, using data from the Web of Science, Journal Citation Reports and CORE databases. Focusing on the areas of data mining, operating systems and web design, it is shown that whilst the productivity of Chinese research has risen dramatically over the period under review, its impact is still low when compared with established scientific nations such as the USA, the UK and Japan. The publication and citation data for China are compared with corresponding data for the other three BRIC nations (Brazil, Russian and India). It is shown that China dominates the BRIC nations in terms of both publications and citations, but that Indian publications often have a greater individual impact. © The Author(s) 2012