Technical Report: “Coverage of Author Identifiers in Web of Science and Scopus”

The following technical report was recently made available by the authors on arXiv.
Title
Coverage of Author Identifiers in Web of Science and Scopus
Authors
Thomas Krämer
GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany
Fakhri Momeni
GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany
Philipp Mayr
GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany
Source
via arXiv
March 3, 2017
Abstract

As digital collections of scientific literature are widespread and used frequently in knowledge-intense working environments, it has become a challenge to identify author names correctly. The treatment of homonyms is crucial for the reliable resolution of author names. Apart from varying handling of first, middle and last names, vendors as well as the digital library community created tools to address the problem of author name disambiguation.
This technical report focuses on two widespread collections of scientific literature, Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, and the coverage with author identification information such as Researcher ID, ORCID and Scopus Author Identifier in the period 1996 – 2014.
The goal of this study is to describe the significant differences of the two collections with respect to overall distribution of author identifiers and its use across different subject domains. We found that the STM disciplines show the best coverage of author identifiers in our dataset of 6,032,000 publications which are both covered by WoS and Scopus. In our dataset we found 184,823 distinct ResearcherIDs and 70,043 distinct ORCIDs. In the appendix of this report we list a complete overview of all WoS subject areas and the amount of author identifiers in these subject areas.

Direct to Full Text Report
23 pages; PDF. 

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