Automatic detection of missing information in the indexing of scientific publications

• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigues, David Miguel Nunes
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/30270
• topic: Research databases; Citations; Web Scraping; Web of Science; Scopus; OpenAlex; Bases de indexação; Citações

The number of citations received by a research paper is a vital metric for both researchers and institutions. Various indexing databases share common citations, facilitating cross-database comparison to identify citations missing from one or more databases, which are not contributing to a paper’s total citation count. To address this issue, we have developed an automated method for identifying missing citations by leveraging multiple indexing databases. In this research, we sought to identify these missing citations in Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar while also utilizing OpenAlex to aid in this process. Our research journey involved multiple experiments. Initially, we started with a prototype that used only two databases (Web of Science and OpenAlex) and later expanded our approach to include Scopus. Unfortunately, we were unable to incorporate Google Scholar. By conducting these experiments, we were able to compare the data found in Web of Science and gain a deeper understanding of the impact of adding a new database. We also repeated the same experiment one month later to track the changes that occur over time in these databases. After analyzing more than 3 000 different publications, we successfully identified missing citations in 847 of them, totaling 2 212 missing citations. Out of these, 1 075 were missing from Web of Science, and 1 137 were missing from Scopus. The addition of Scopus to our approach resulted in a 54% increase in the number of missing citations detected in Web of Science, highlighting the significant impact of incorporating this database.