A paper's corresponding affiliation and first affiliation are consistent at the country level in Web of Science

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 18 million Web of Science papers from 2000 to 2015, finding high consistency between first and corresponding affiliations at the country level but lower at the institution level, with implications for bibliometric research.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale, quantitative analysis of affiliation consistency at different levels, revealing temporal and country variations, and highlights data recording changes in WoS.

Findings

Over 98% match at the country level.

Lower and variable match at the institution level.

Evidence of changes in WoS affiliation data since 2013.

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between the first affiliation and the corresponding affiliation at the different levels via the scientometric analysis We select over 18 million papers in the core collection database of Web of Science (WoS) published from 2000 to 2015, and measure the percentage of match between the first and the corresponding affiliation at the country and institution level. We find that a paper's the first affiliation and the corresponding affiliation are highly consistent at the country level, with over 98% of the match on average. However, the match at the institution level is much lower, which varies significantly with time and country. Hence, for studies at the country level, using the first and corresponding affiliations are almost the same. But we may need to take more cautions to select affiliation when the institution is the focus of the investigation. In the meanwhile, we find some evidence that the recorded corresponding information in the WoS database has undergone some changes since 2013, which sheds light on future studies on the comparison of different databases or the affiliation accuracy of WoS. Our finding relies on the records of WoS, which may not be entirely accurate. Given the scale of the analysis, our findings can serve as a useful reference for further studies when country allocation or institute allocation is needed. Existing studies on comparisons of straight counting methods usually cover a limited number of papers, a particular research field or a limited range of time. More importantly, using the number counted can not sufficiently tell if the corresponding and first affiliation are similar. This paper uses a metric similar to Jaccard similarity to measure the percentage of the match and performs a comprehensive analysis based on a large-scale bibliometric database.