Category Archives: oa.scopus

[2307.09704] How are exclusively data journals indexed in major scholarly databases? An examination of the Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, and OpenAlex

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Abstract:  As part of the data-driven paradigm and open science movement, the data paper is becoming a popular way for researchers to publish their research data, based on academic norms that cross knowledge domains. Data journals have also been created to host this new academic genre. The growing number of data papers and journals has made them an important large-scale data source for understanding how research data is published and reused in our research system. One barrier to this research agenda is a lack of knowledge as to how data journals and their publications are indexed in the scholarly databases used for quantitative analysis. To address this gap, this study examines how a list of 18 exclusively data journals (i.e., journals that primarily accept data papers) are indexed in four popular scholarly databases: the Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, and OpenAlex. We investigate how comprehensively these databases cover the selected data journals and, in particular, how they present the document type information of data papers. We find that the coverage of data papers, as well as their document type information, is highly inconsistent across databases, which creates major challenges for future efforts to study them quantitatively. As a result, we argue that efforts should be made by data journals and databases to improve the quality of metadata for this emerging genre.

 

 

New study shows OpenAlex is a good alternative to Scopus for demographic research – OurResearch blog

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Highlights

New research from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research analyzes global migration of scholars, using bibliometric data. They do a side-by-side comparison of this analysis between Scopus and OpenAlex data.
Counts of scholars by country are highly correlated between Scopus and OpenAlex.
Migration events are less correlated between the two, but trends in migration between top pairs of countries are consistent between them. There is higher correlation with Western countries, and OpenAlex has more coverage of non-Western countries.
OpenAlex is open. Scopus is not. This puts limits on how researchers can perform and share this type of analysis….”

Indian PhDs, professors are paying to publish in real-sounding, fake journals. It’s a racket

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This newspaper article describes the publishing behavior of a large section of Indian researchers who publish their research in predatory journals. Pressure to publish, lack of awareness, and career progression are some of the reasons.

Escaping ‘bibliometric coloniality’, ‘epistemic inequality’

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“Africa’s scholarly journals compete on an unequal playing field because of a lack of funding and the struggle to sustain academic credibility.

“These inequalities are exacerbated by the growing influence of the major citation indexes, leading to what we have called bibliometric coloniality,” say the authors of the book, Who Counts? Ghanaian academic publishing and global science, published by African Minds at the start of 2023.

“The rules of the game continue to be defined outside the continent. We hope that, in some small way, this book contributes to the renaissance and renewal of African-centred research and publishing infrastructures,” the authors say….”

Recalibrating the Scope of Scholarly Publishing: A Modest Step in a Vast Decolonization Process | Quantitative Science Studies | MIT Press

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Abstract:  By analyzing 25,671 journals largely absent from common journal counts, as well as Web of Science and Scopus, this study demonstrates that scholarly communication is more of a global endeavor than is commonly credited. These journals, employing the open source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS), have published 5.8 million items; they are in 136 countries, with 79.9% in the Global South and 84.2% following the OA diamond model (charging neither reader nor author). A substantial proportion of journals operate in more than one language (48.3%), with research published in a total of 60 languages (led by English, Indonesian, Spanish, and Portuguese). The journals are distributed across the social sciences (45.9%), STEM (40.3%), and the humanities (13.8%). For all their geographic, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity, 1.2% are indexed in the Web of Science and 5.7% in Scopus. On the other hand, 1.0% are found in Cabells Predatory Reports, while 1.4% show up in Beall’s questionable list. This paper seeks to both contribute and historically situate expanded scale and diversity of scholarly publishing in the hope that this recognition may assist humankind in taking full advantage of what is increasingly a global research enterprise.

 

Analyzing Your Institution’s Publishing Output

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Abstract:  Understanding institutional publishing output is crucial to scholarly communications work. This class will equip participants to analyze article publishing by authors at an institution.

After completing the course, participants will be able to

Gain an understanding of their institution’s publishing output, such as number of publications per year, open access status of the publications, major funders of the research, and estimates of how much funding might be spent toward article processing charges (APCs).
Think critically about institutional publishing data to make sustainable and values-driven scholarly communications decisions.

This course will build on open infrastructure, including Unpaywall and OpenRefine. We will provide examples of how to do analyses in both OpenRefine and Microsoft Excel. 

The course will consist of two parts. In the first, participants will learn how to build a dataset. We will provide lessons about downloading data from different sources: Web of Science, Scopus, and The Lens. (Web of Science and Scopus are subscription databases; The Lens is freely available.) 

In the second part of the course, participants will learn data analysis methods that can help answer questions such as:

Should you cancel or renew a subscription?
Who is funding your institution’s researchers?
Are your institution’s authors using an institutional repository?
Should you accept a publisher’s open access publishing offer?

Library agreements with publishers are at a crucial turning point, as they more and more often include OA publishing. By learning to do these analyses for themselves, participants will be better prepared to enter into negotiations with a publisher. The expertise developed through this course can make the uneven playing field of library-publisher negotiations slightly more even.

Course materials will be openly available. This will be a facilitated course taught by the authors.

Librarians gain new insights into their researchers’ arXiv usage | arXiv.org blog

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“Founded three decades ago, arXiv is now home to more than 2 million open access scholarly articles by researchers in disciplines ranging from computer science to economics.

With its ambitious mission to provide an open platform where researchers can share and discover new, relevant, and emerging science, arXiv’s popularity has continued to grow in recent years. In fact, in many fields of mathematics and physics, the majority of scientific papers are posted on arXiv prior to their publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

arXiv is hosted at Cornell University, with financial support from the Simons Foundation, other donors, and more than 200 member institutions.

New among the membership benefits that all institutions receive, is access to a personalized digital dashboard, containing an overview of the articles their researchers have posted on the platform. This is the first time submission data by institution — including subject category breakdown – has been offered to arXiv members.

To provide this information, arXiv is partnering with Scopus to optimize that publication data and increase institution’s visibility of their researcher contributions….”

Go from discovery to full-text access on Scopus! New full-text options available now | Elsevier Scopus Blog

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“Scopus aims to provide the most streamlined path from discovery to access, to enable you to find and make use of full-text version of the research content you are looking for. Wherever possible, we aim to link to the version of record (VOR), also known as the final published version. When this is not possible, we now provide access to the repository/Green Open Access (Green OA) version, when available. Learn more about our updated full-text options are now available on the Scopus Document Details page.”

Journals In Beall’s List Perform as a Group Less Well Than Other Open Access Journals Indexed In Scopus But Reveal Large Differences Among Publishers

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The list of potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly open access (OA) publishers compiled by Jeffrey Beall was examined to determine the effect of their inclusion upon authors, and a possible bias against OA journals. Manually collected data from the publication archives of a sample of 250 journals from Beall publishers reveals a strong tendency towards a decline in their article output during 2012–2020. A comparison of the subset of 506 Beall journals indexed in Scopus with a benchmark set of other OA journals in Scopus with similar characteristics shows that Beall journals reveal as a group a strong decline in citation impact over the years, and reached an impact level far below that of their benchmarks. The Beall list of publishers was found to be heterogeneous in terms of bibliometric indicators but to be clearly differentiated from OA journals not included in the list. The same bibliometric comparison against comparable non-OA journals reveal similar, but less marked, differences in citation and publication growth.

Elsevier’s Scopus expands to include SSRN preprints

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“Elsevier, a global leader in research publishing and information analytics, today announces that preprints from SSRN, its world-leading early stage research and preprint platform, are now available through Scopus, Elsevier’s abstract and citation database. This follows preprints from arXiv, ChemRxiv, bioRxiv and medRxiv being indexed in Scopus earlier this year.

This development comes in reaction to feedback and requests from the researcher community, as demand for and use of preprints has jumped in recent years. At present, over 1 million Author Profiles in Scopus have 900,000 preprints indexed to them dating back to 2017. By the end of this year, approximately 170,000 SSRN preprints, from 2017 onwards will be included in Scopus….”

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

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Abstract:  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 in coverage and content, resultant from their owners’ indexation philosophies. In light of these differences, we explore here, using a citation network analysis and assessment of normalised citation impact of “duplicate” publications, whether the three databases offer structurally different perspectives of the bibliometric landscape or if they are essentially homogenous substitutes. Our citation network analysis of core and exclusive 2016-2018 publications revealed a large set of core publications indexed in all three databases that are highly self-referential. In comparison, each database selected a set of exclusive publications that appeared to hold similarly low levels of relevance to the core set and to one another, with slightly more internal communication between exclusive publications in Scopus and Dimensions than WoS. Our comparison of normalised citations for 41,848 publications indexed in all three databases found that German sectors were valuated as more impactful in Scopus and Dimensions compared to WoS, particularly for sectors with an applied research focus. We conclude that the databases do present structurally different perspectives, although Scopus and Dimensions with their additional circle of applied research vary more from the more base research-focused WoS than they do from one another.

 

Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus: Which is best for me? | Impact of Social Sciences

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“Being able to find, assess and place new research within a field of knowledge, is integral to any research project. For social scientists this process is increasingly likely to take place on Google Scholar, closely followed by traditional scholarly databases. In this post, Alberto Martín-Martín, Enrique Orduna-Malea , Mike Thelwall, Emilio Delgado-López-Cózar, analyse the relative coverage of the three main research databases, Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus, finding significant divergences in the social sciences and humanities and suggest that researchers face a trade-off when using different databases: between more comprehensive, but disorderly systems and orderly, but limited systems….”

The journal coverage of Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions: A comparative analysis | SpringerLink

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Abstract:  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 aims to present a comparative analysis of the journal coverage of the three databases (Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions), with the objective to describe, understand and visualize the differences in them. The most recent master journal lists of the three databases is used for analysis. 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 journal coverage, with 82.22% more journals than Web of Science and 48.17% more journals than Scopus. This article also analysed the research outputs for 20 selected countries for the 2010–2018 period, as indexed in the three databases, and identified database-induced variations in research output volume, rank, global share and subject area composition for different countries. It is found that there are clearly visible variations in the research output from different countries in the three databases, along with differential coverage of different subject areas by the three databases. The analytical study provides an informative and practically useful picture of the journal coverage of Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions databases.

 

Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Scopus, Dimensions, Web of Science, and OpenCitations’ COCI: a multidisciplinary comparison of coverage via citations | SpringerLink

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Abstract:  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 Core Collection (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 found 88% of all citations, many of which were not found by the other sources, and nearly all citations found by the remaining sources (89–94%). A similar pattern held within most subject categories. Microsoft Academic is the second largest overall (60% of all citations), including 82% of Scopus citations and 86% of WoS citations. In most categories, Microsoft Academic found more citations than Scopus and WoS (182 and 223 subject categories, respectively), but had coverage gaps in some areas, such as Physics and some Humanities categories. After Scopus, Dimensions is fourth largest (54% of all citations), including 84% of Scopus citations and 88% of WoS citations. It found more citations than Scopus in 36 categories, more than WoS in 185, and displays some coverage gaps, especially in the Humanities. Following WoS, COCI is the smallest, with 28% of all citations. Google Scholar is still the most comprehensive source. In many subject categories Microsoft Academic and Dimensions are good alternatives to Scopus and WoS in terms of coverage.

 

 

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

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Abstract:  We present a large-scale comparison of five multidisciplinary bibliographic data sources: Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic. The comparison considers all 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 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.