Abstract
In this research letter, we draw the attention of the scientometrics community to the fact that numerous records of non-English publications in the Scopus and Web of Science databases do not include information about the country of the authors. We provide quantitative evidence that in the cases when the language of papers is official exclusively for one country, the majority of these country-undefined publications belong to the corresponding ‘maternal’ country. These limitations of citation databases must be taken into account when conducting bibliometric analysis, especially when comparing the outputs in social sciences and humanities at the level of countries.
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Notes
If any additional correlations are absent.
References
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Mryglod, O., Nazarovets, S. Lost for the country: country-undefined papers in Web of Science and Scopus. Scientometrics 128, 2619–2622 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04661-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04661-1