Analysing the coverage of the University of Bologna's bibliographic and citation metadata in OpenCitations collections

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the extent to which the University of Bologna's IRIS publication metadata and citations are represented in OpenCitations, revealing a 36% coverage and comparable citation counts to proprietary sources.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dataset and methodology for analyzing the coverage of university IRIS data in open citation collections.

Findings

36% of IRIS publications are covered in OpenCitations

Over 5 million citation links involve UNIBO IRIS publications

Coverage and citation counts are comparable to proprietary sources like Scopus and Web of Science

Abstract

This study focuses on analysing the coverage of publications' metadata available in the Current Research Information System (CRIS) infrastructure of the University of Bologna (UNIBO), implemented by the IRIS platform, within an authoritative source of open research information, i.e. OpenCitations. The analysis considers data regarding the publication entities alongside the citation links. We precisely quantify the proportion of UNIBO IRIS publications included in OpenCitations, examine their types, and evaluate the number of citations in OpenCitations that involve IRIS publications. Our methodology filters and transforms data dumps of IRIS and OpenCitations, creating novel datasets used for the analysis. Our findings reveal that only 36% of IRIS is covered in OpenCitations, with journal articles exhibiting the highest coverage. We identified 5,129,406 citation links pointing to UNIBO IRIS publications. From a purely quantitative perspective, comparing our results with broader proprietary services like Scopus and Web of Science reveals a comparable quantitative coverage in the number of IRIS bibliographic resources included in all the systems analysed (OpenCitations, Scopus and Web of Science) as well as in the number of citations received by them.