Abstract
The expansion of Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) over the recent years has partially accounted for the “norm” of growth of research output in many bibliometric analysis studies. However, the expansion patterns of different citation indexes may be different, which may benefit some disciplines but hinder others. Utilizing Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), this study attempts to elaborate on WoSCC’s coverage expansion patterns among these three databases from 2001 to 2020. Results show that different from SCIE/SSCI, both the annual publication volumes in the A&HCI database and all A&HCI journals have remained relatively stagnant in all document types considered scenario or have gained relatively slight increases in only citable items considered scenario. Although the number of A&HCI journals also has increased remarkably, the average journal publication volume of A&HCI journals has decreased gradually if all document types are considered or kept relatively stagnant when citable items only are considered. Besides, the A&HCI database has ceased the systematic index of individually selected items from SCIE/SSCI journals since 2018. The study finally discusses the possible causes and consequences of the unbalanced expansion of WoSCC’s different citation indexes.
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Notes
The Master Journal List is a tool for researchers to find and identify the right journal on the Web of Science platform. The list of journals is updated on an at least monthly basis. See https://mjl.clarivate.com/home.
"Individually selected journal" is named by the authors themselves. This study chooses to use this terminology for the convenience of explanation.
Data show that SSCI database also individually selects a limited number of items from A&HCI journals for some years. For example, the A&HCI journal Style published 44 papers in 2006 and two of them were individually selected into the SSCI database.
Although the Journal Master List contains citable item indicator for SCIE and SSCI journals from 1997 to 2020 (Vanderstraeten & Vandermoere, 2021), it does not include corresponding data for A&HCI journals. In order to unify the calculation method, this study does not use the citable item indicator directly but uses journal publication volume exported from WoSCC. See: http://help.incites.clarivate.com/incitesLiveJCR/9607-TRS/version/9.
In this paper, we only need to identify whether journals retrieved from SSCI database are SSCI journals or individually selected journals from SCIE/A&HCI journals, therefore, we do not further distinguish whether these SSCI journals are also SCIE or A&HCI journals.
There is a small share of records with both journal titles and book series titles in the WoSCC, which results in a slight over-counting of the number of papers and journals. For example, when searching for the journal Annual Review of Virology, both Annual Review of Virology and Annual Review of Virology VOL* appear on the search results page.
A slight decrease of the number of publication titles retrieved from SCIE database can be witnessed in Fig. 3 for the year 2020. It is mainly due to the delayed indexation of some book series titles and retrospective data for some newly indexed journals.
As mentioned before, data of the last year (year 2020) will be underestimated due to delayed indexation. Non-standardized publication titles (journal titles and book series titles) for a limited share of papers have not been unified.
WoSCC includes the following six OA types: gold, gold hybrid, free to read, green publisher, green accept, and green submitted. As stated in the help file, “All articles in these journals must have a license in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative to be called Gold”. See https://webofscience.help.clarivate.com/en-us/Content/open-access.html.
Each database has its own coverage. Which database should be more likely to be the gold standard is not the scope of our study. By comparing with Scopus via three cases, it can at least prove that the stagnation of the number of papers in A&HCI is not a normal phenomenon that can be ignored.
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Acknowledgements
The work has been supported by Soft Science Project of Zhejiang Province (No. 2022C35055).
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WL: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing; RN: Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – original draft; GH: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – review & editing.
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Liu, W., Ni, R. & Hu, G. Web of Science Core Collection’s coverage expansion: the forgotten Arts & Humanities Citation Index?. Scientometrics 129, 933–955 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04917-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04917-w