Étiquette : OpenAlex

Publié le

Evaluating the linguistic coverage of OpenAlex: An assessment of metadata accuracy and completeness

Authors : Lucía Céspedes, Diego Kozlowski, Carolina Pradier, Maxime Holmberg Sainte-Marie, Natsumi Solange Shokida, Pierre Benz,
Constance Poitras, Anton Boudreau Ninkov, Saeideh Ebrahimy, Philips Ayeni, Sarra Filali, Bing Li, Vincent Larivière

Clarivate’s Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier’s Scopus have been for decades the main sources of bibliometric information. Although highly curated, these closed, proprietary databases are largely biased toward English-language publications, underestimating the use of other languages in research dissemination.

Launched in 2022, OpenAlex promised comprehensive, inclusive, and open-source research information. While already in use by scholars and research institutions, the quality of its metadata is currently still being assessed. This paper contributes to this literature by assessing the completeness and accuracy of OpenAlex’s metadata related to language, through a comparison with WoS, as well as an in-depth manual validation of a sample of 6836 articles.

Results show that OpenAlex exhibits a far more balanced linguistic coverage than WoS. However, language metadata are not always accurate, which leads OpenAlex to overestimate the place of English while underestimating that of other languages. If used critically, OpenAlex can provide comprehensive and representative analyses of languages used for scholarly publishing, but more work is needed at infrastructural level to ensure the quality of metadata on language.

URL : Evaluating the linguistic coverage of OpenAlex: An assessment of metadata accuracy and completeness

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24979

Publié le

Open Science Alternatives to Scopus and the Web of Science: A Case Study in Regional Resilience

Authors : Irina D. Turgel, Olga A. Chernova

The recent years have seen increasing support for open science in academic circles. However, the large number of scientometric databases calls into question the comparability of the search and analysis tools they provide.

Using the subject area of regional resilience as an example, in this study, the aim was to analyze the capabilities of widely used databases to serve as alternatives to Scopus and Web of Science in solving research problems.

As alternatives, in the present article, the following open, free scientometric databases were considered: AMiner, Wizdom.ai, the Lens, Dimensions, and OpenAlex. Their capabilities were demonstrated for the subject area under study, and the obtained results were compared.

The study results showed that alternative databases provide essential data on trends in scientific development. It is noteworthy that they largely replicate the provided data, supplementing and expanding them by using different types of data sources. However, open databases do not guarantee a high quality of materials and exhibit a relatively low level of metadata.

Thus, it is premature to abandon the use of Scopus and Web of Science in research activities. Since scientometric databases were developed in different contexts, they are characterized by structural and functional heterogeneity, which complicates their comparison.

Therefore, a selective approach should be adopted for the choice of scientometric databases, taking into account financial and other constraints, as well as the specifics of research problems.

URL : Open Science Alternatives to Scopus and the Web of Science: A Case Study in Regional Resilience

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications12040043