Technology Category
Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Linked Open Data, Knowledge Graphs & KB CompletionSearch and Optimization: Evaluation and AnalysisApplication Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
The'Big Three'of Scientific Information: A comparative bibliometric review of Web of Science, Scopus, and OpenAlex
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the lack of systematic comparative analysis among major scholarly databases—Web of Science, Scopus, and OpenAlex—regarding their coverage, metadata quality, and functional characteristics, a gap that undermines the scientific rigor of research evaluation. Combining a systematic literature review with longitudinal bibliometric analyses of publications from 2015 to 2024, this work offers the first comprehensive assessment of these platforms across key dimensions: record volume, open-access coverage, linguistic diversity, reference completeness, and metadata accuracy. Through multidimensional indicators—including coverage statistics, thematic distributions, language composition, and database overlap—the study reveals significant disparities in disciplinary representation and content structure. It concludes with ten executive insights and five actionable recommendations for research assessment, providing empirical foundations to inform policy development and scholarly practice.
Technology Category
Application Category
📝 Abstract
The present comparative study examines the three main multidisciplinary bibliographic databases, Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, and OpenAlex, with the aim of providing up-to-date evidence on coverage, metadata quality, and functional features to help inform strategic decisions in research assessment. The report is structured into two complementary methodological sections. First, it presents a systematic review of recent scholarly literature that investigates record volume, open-access coverage, linguistic diversity, reference coverage, and metadata quality; this is followed by an original bibliometric analysis of the 2015-2024 period that explores longitudinal distribution, document types, thematic profiles, linguistic differences, and overlap between databases. The text concludes with a ten-point executive summary and five recommendations.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
bibliometric
database comparison
Web of Science
Scopus
OpenAlex
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
bibliometric analysis
database comparison
metadata quality
open-access coverage
research assessment
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
