Assessing and Comparing the Coverage of Italian Publications in OpenCitations: a Study within Six Italian Universities

TL;DR

This study assesses the coverage of Italian university publications in OpenCitations, revealing over 40% coverage with gaps in social sciences and humanities, highlighting Open Science infrastructure's growing maturity.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed evaluation of Italian university publication coverage in OpenCitations, comparing it to proprietary databases and identifying areas for improvement.

Findings

OpenCitations covers over 40% of IRIS publications.

Coverage is comparable to Scopus and Web of Science.

Gaps exist for social sciences and humanities publications.

Abstract

Recent initiatives advocating responsible, transparent research assessment have intensified the call to use open research information rather than proprietary databases. This study evaluates the coverage and citation representation of publications recorded in the Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), all instances of the IRIS software platform, of six Italian universities within OpenCitations, a community-owned open infrastructure. Using persistent identifiers (DOIs, PMIDs, and ISBNs) specified in the IRIS installations involved, we matched the publications recorded in OpenCitations Meta and extracted the related citation links from the OpenCitations Index. Results show that OpenCitations covers, on average, over 40% of IRIS publications, which is quantitatively comparable to those reported by Scopus and Web of Science in another study. However, gaps persist, particularly for publication types prevalent in the Social Sciences and Humanities, such as monographs and critical editions. Overall, the findings demonstrate the growing maturity of OpenCitations and, more broadly, of Open Science infrastructures as viable alternatives as sources of research information, while highlighting areas where further metadata enrichment and interoperability efforts are needed.