Abstract
Web of Science Core Collection, one of the most authoritative bibliographic databases, is widely used in academia to track high-quality research. This database has begun to index online-first articles since December 2017. This new practice has introduced two different publication dates (online and final publication dates) into the database for more and more early access publications. It may confuse many users who want to search or analyze literature by using the publication-year related tools provided by Web of Science Core Collection. By developing custom retrieval strategies and checking manually, this study finds that the “year published” field in search page searches in both online and final publication date fields of indexed records. Each indexed record is allocated to only one “publication year” on the left of the search results page which will inherit first from online publication date field even when the online publication date is later than the final publication date. The “publication year” field in the results analysis page and the timespan “custom year range” field in the search page have the same function as that of the filter “publication year” in search results page. The potential impact of the availability of two different publication dates in calculating bibliometric indicators is also discussed at the end of the article.
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Notes
As advised by Liu (2019), we specify the details of citation indexes used in this study for reproductivity.
More information about the timespan, please refer to https://images.webofknowledge.com/images/help/WOS/hp_timespan.html.
For more information about the naming rules of DOI, please refer to https://www.doi.org/doi_handbook/2_Numbering.html.
A latest study also finds some abnormal phenomena for the year 2000 (Hu et al. 2020). Web of Science Core Collection may update its policies continuously or be with a very small percentage of errors.
For example, 78 citable items which were published online in 2018 but finally published in 2019 were counted into the calculation of the 2019 journal impact factor of the journal Antioxidants and Redox Signaling. “The current policy is for the JCR to use the final publication year. We are aware of a relatively small number of journals, including Antioxidants and Redox Signaling, where articles that were indexed as Early Access in 2018 and final in 2019 were inadvertently included in the denominator. These are being addressed in the JCR reload—the Early Access 2018 items and the citations to those items will be removed from the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) calculation. As a result of this change, we forecast the revised JIF of Antioxidants and Redox Signaling will be 7.040.” We are glad to see the quick response from Clarivate.
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Acknowledgements
This research is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71801189) and Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. LQ18G030010). All of the views expressed here are those of the author who also takes full responsibility for any errors.
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Liu, W. A matter of time: publication dates in Web of Science Core Collection. Scientometrics 126, 849–857 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03697-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03697-x