Tale of Three Databases: The Implication of Coverage Demonstrated for a Sample Query
Open accessAbstract
Coverage is an important criterion when evaluating information systems. This exploratory study investigates this issue by submitting the same query to different databases relevant to the query topic. Data were retrieved from three databases: ACM Digital Library, Web of Science (WOS) (with the Proceedings Citation Index) and Scopus. The search phrase was “information retrieval”, publication years were between 2013 and 2016. Altogether 8,699 items were retrieved, out of which 5,306 (61%) items were retrieved by a single database only, and only 977 (11%) items were located in all three databases. The results from the three databases were analyzed and compared by number of publications and citations counts, for the whole time period and by year. Document types distribution and the h-indices of the retrieved datasets were also compared. The 977 items retrieved by all three databases were further analyzed, citations were also compared to altmetric data for these publications, collected from Mendeley.
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The majority of studies determined better coverage of conference material in Scopus when compared to WoS.
“However, although the share of conference proceedings articles in Scopus and in WoS is statistically similar (approximately 10%) [52], the majority of studies determined better coverage of conference material in Scopus when compared to WoS [26,39,53,55,57,59].”
From Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World (2021) · cites this paper as [57]
In computer sciences, only 63% of the documents retrieved by WoS were also found by Scopus.
“Meanwhile, in another study focused on computer sciences, only 63% of the documents retrieved by WoS were also found by Scopus [57].”
From Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World (2021) · cites this paper as [57]
Unique sources indexed by Scopus but not by WoS had lower citation impact values.
“It was observed that the unique sources that were indexed by Scopus, but not by WoS, had lower citation impact values [57]”
From Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World (2021) · cites this paper as [57]
Authors employing DOI matching have usually reported a certain amount of missing or not functional DOIs in both WoS and Scopus.
“authors employing this method have usually reported a certain amount of missing or not functional DOIs in both DBs [53,57,59].”
From Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World (2021) · cites this paper as [57]
Recall rates between databases may highly differ due to different coverage of relevant content.
“In any case, it should be noted that the recall rates between DBs may highly differ due to the different coverage of relevant content [23,27,43,57].”
From Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World (2021) · cites this paper as [57]
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References 25 · Cited by 43
Research works printed but not linked: 1
- Bar-Ilan, J. (2017). Bibliometrics of "Information Retrieval" -A Tale of Three Databases. Available at: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1888/paper7.pdf
- Authors
- Bar-Ilan, J.
- Venue
- Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media SA
- Published
- 2018-02-20
- Volume
- 3
- ISSN
- 2504-0537 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2793016116
- Cited by
- 43
- References
- 25
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 1.53
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Library Science and Information
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web visibility and informetrics
- Keywords
- database coverage, information retrieval, ACM Digital Library, Web of Science, Scopus, bibliographic database comparison, citation counts, altmetrics, Mendeley, h-index, document types
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