Comparing bibliographic data sources: Q&A - Leiden Madtrics
peter.suber's bookmarks 2020-05-29
Summary:
"Last week CWTS researchers Martijn Visser, Nees Jan van Eck, and Ludo Waltman published the paper 'Large-scale comparison of bibliographic data sources: Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic'. In this post, the authors answer ten questions about their work.
Your paper is based on a huge amount of data. How did you manage to get access to so much data?
In the internal database system of CWTS, we have access to the raw data of Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic. CWTS is probably the only center in the world that has access to all this data, so we are in a unique position to compare the different data sources. Getting access to data from Crossref and Microsoft Academic is easy, since their data is openly available. Anyone can get access to their data. In the case of Scopus and Dimensions, CWTS is in the fortunate situation to receive their raw data for free for research purposes. (Note that Scopus and Dimensions both offer possibilities to scientometric researchers to get free access to their data. See here for Scopus and here for Dimensions.) Web of Science is the only data source for which we pay. CWTS has a paid license that enables us to use Web of Science data in our research...."