Accuracy of citation data in Web of Science and Scopus
Nees Jan van Eck, Ludo Waltman
TL;DR
This study assesses the accuracy of citation data in Web of Science and Scopus, revealing significant data quality issues such as missing references, incorrect citations, and duplicate publications affecting research reliability.
Contribution
It provides a large-scale comparative analysis highlighting specific data quality problems in both citation databases, which was previously underexplored.
Findings
Web of Science has significant missing and incorrect references.
Scopus faces serious issues with duplicate publications.
Both databases exhibit notable data quality problems.
Abstract
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.
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Taxonomy
Topicsscientometrics and bibliometrics research · Scientific Computing and Data Management · Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies