Introducing CitedReferencesExplorer (CRExplorer): A program for Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy with Cited References Standardization

We introduce a new tool - the CitedReferencesExplorer (CRExplorer, www.crexplorer.net) - which can be used to disambiguate and analyze the cited references (CRs) of a publication set downloaded from the Web of Science (WoS). The tool is especially suitable to identify those publications which have been frequently cited by the researchers in a field and thereby to study for example the historical roots of a research field or topic. CRExplorer simplifies the identification of key publications by enabling the user to work with both a graph for identifying most frequently cited reference publication years (RPYs) and the list of references for the RPYs which have been most frequently cited. A further focus of the program is on the standardization of CRs. It is a serious problem in bibliometrics that there are several variants of the same CR in the WoS. In this study, CRExplorer is used to study the CRs of all papers published in the Journal of Informetrics. The analyses focus on the most important papers published between 1980 and 1990.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Journal of Informetric

Large-scale comparison of bibliographic data sources: Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic

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 citation links. Based on our analysis, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the different data sources. We emphasize the importance of combining a comprehensive coverage of the scientific literature with a flexible set of filters for making selections of the literature.Merit, Expertise and Measuremen

The structural role of the core literature in history

The intellectual landscapes of the humanities are mostly uncharted territory. Little is known on the ways published research of humanist scholars defines areas of intellectual activity. An open question relates to the structural role of core literature: highly cited sources, naturally playing a disproportionate role in the definition of intellectual landscapes. We introduce four indicators in order to map the structural role played by core sources into connecting different areas of the intellectual landscape of citing publications (i.e. communities in the bibliographic coupling network). All indicators factor out the influence of degree distributions by internalizing a null configuration model. By considering several datasets focused on history, we show that two distinct structural actions are performed by the core literature: a global one, by connecting otherwise separated communities in the landscape, or a local one, by rising connectivity within communities. In our study, the global action is mainly performed by small sets of scholarly monographs, reference works and primary sources, while the rest of the core, and especially most journal articles, acts mostly locally

Empirical analysis and classification of database errors in Scopus and Web of Science

In the last decade, a growing number of studies focused on the qualitative/quantitative analysis of bibliometric-database errors. Most of these studies relied on the identification and (manual) examination of relatively limited samples of errors. Using an automated procedure, we collected a large corpus of more than 10,000 errors in the two multidisciplinary databases Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), mainly including articles in the Engineering-Manufacturing field. Based on the manual examination of a portion (of about 10%) of these errors, this paper provides a preliminary analysis and classification, identifying similarities and differences between Scopus and WoS. The analysis reveals interesting results, such as: (i) although Scopus seems more accurate than WoS, it tends to forget to index more papers, causing the loss of the relevant citations given/obtained, (ii) both databases have relatively serious problems in managing the so-called Online-First articles, and (iii) lack of correlation between databases, regarding the distribution of the errors in several error categories. The description is supported by practical examples concerning a variety of errors in the Scopus and WoS databases

TimeRank: A dynamic approach to rate scholars using citations

Rating has become a common practice of modern science. No rating system can be considered as final, but instead several approaches can be taken, which magnify different aspects of the fabric of science. We introduce an approach for rating scholars which uses citations in a dynamic fashion, allocating ratings by considering the relative position of two authors at the time of the citation among them. Our main goal is to introduce the notion of citation timing as a complement to the usual suspects of popularity and prestige. We aim to produce a rating able to account for a variety of interesting phenomena, such as positioning raising stars on a more even footing with established researchers. We apply our method on the bibliometrics community using data from the Web of Science from 2000 to 2016, showing how the dynamic method is more effective than alternatives in this respect

Co-authorship networks and research impact in large research facilities: benchmarking internal reports and bibliometric databases

In this paper, we address the main differences of the scientific production between internal and external researcher groups of a synchrotron radiation facility. Through the construction and analysis of their co-authorship networks, we could see the structural variations in the way these two different kinds of research groups collaborate. We also evaluated the scientific impact of each group and found surprising similarities, which led us to create two hypotheses that might contribute to the comprehension of the scientific assessment of large-scale research facilities. We found that, as the review criteria the studied synchrotron adopts to select external scientific projects is very effective; the quality of the external research is at least as good as the internal. Therefore, evaluating the internal scientific output appears to be an appropriate representation of the impact of the whole laboratory.Merit, Expertise and Measuremen