Abstract
Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science Core Collection, a comprehensive database consisting of ten sub-datasets, is increasingly applied in academic research across over two hundred Web of Science categories. 271 English language SCIE and SSCI papers published in 2017–2018 from the category of Information Science and Library Science have mentioned “Web of Science” in the topic field. A manual check of the full texts of these papers reveals that 243 of them have used “Web of Science Core Collection” as the data source but over half of them haven’t specified the sub-datasets of Web of Science Core Collection used in the study. Since many institutions may only subscribe to a customized subset of the whole core collection, the non-transparency of the data source will hinder the reproducibility of some corresponding studies. This study suggests that researchers should specify the sub-datasets and corresponding coverage timespans when using Web of Science Core Collection as the data source.
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Notes
The newly provided backfile of ESCI expands the coverage of the period 2005–2014. http://info.clarivate.com/ESCI?_ga=1.144241463.383957850.1488223989.
Different to the search strategy of Li et al. (2018), only the keyword “Web of Science” is used in this study since the purpose of this study is to verify whether a record has specified the sub-datasets of the Web of Science Core Collection.
By using both “Web of Science” and “Meta” as the keywords to search in the topic field, 9995 records can be retrieved. That is to say, 52% of the records used in this study is also meta related.
Researchers in the field of Information Science & Library Science are more likely to be familiar with the Web of Science Core Collection. They may prefer to specify the sub-datasets when using Web of Science Core Collection.
The author would like to thank the referee to suggest this important work of Dallas and his/her colleagues. It seems that both researchers from the fields of Bioscience and Scientometrics have noticed this important issue.
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Acknowledgements
This research is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71801189) and Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. LQ18G030010). The author would like to thank the referee for his/her insightful suggestions and comments which have significantly improved the manuscript.
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Liu, W. The data source of this study is Web of Science Core Collection? Not enough. Scientometrics 121, 1815–1824 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03238-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03238-1