Citation coverage by Dimensions and Scopus of articles published in European Science Editing

Abstract

Background: The two main bibliometric databases, namely Web of Science and Scopus, are not available for free, whereas the Dimensions is one of the new freely available bibliometric databases and is considered to be an alternative to Scopus in particular.Objectives: To compare the information on citations to articles published in European Science Editing as available in the Dimensions to that available in Scopus.Methods: Information on articles published in European Science Editing that were cited in sources published between 2020 and 2022 was analysed to compare the relevant data as given by Dimensions and Scopus.Results: Both databases were similar in terms of the number of cited articles, the number of citing articles, and the number of citations. Of the total of 35 cited articles, 3 were unique to each of the 2 databases. Of the total of 93 citing articles, 74 were found in Scopus and 75 in the Dimensions.Conclusions: Scopus and Dimensions shared an overlap of 84% in articles cited but of only 60% in the citing articles. Information on individual citing articles strongly suggests that Dimensions takes data on citing articles from CrossRef. Unfortunately, these metadata contain errors. Data on citations in the Dimension database could be made more accurate if the references appended to the citing articles listed in the Crossref database were under an open license.

Keywords

• Citation coverage
• comparison of scholarly databas