Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

What is the best database for computer science journal articles?

  • Published:
Scientometrics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

We compared general and specialized databases, by searching bibliographic information regarding journal articles in the computer science field, and by evaluating their bibliographic coverage and the quality of the bibliographic records retrieved. We selected a sample of computer science articles from an Italian university repository (AIR) to carry out our comparison. The databases selected were INSPEC, Scopus, Web of Science (WoS), and DBLP. We found that DBLP and Scopus indexed the highest number of unique articles (4.14 and 4.05 % respectively), that each of the four databases indexed a set of unique articles, that 12.95 % of the articles sampled were not indexed in any of the databases selected, that Scopus was better than WoS for identifying computer science publications, and that DBLP had a greater number of unique articles indexed (19.03 %), when compared to INSPEC (11.28 %). We also measured the quality of a set of bibliographic records, by comparing five databases: Scopus, WoS, INSPEC, DBLP and Google Scholar (GS). We found that WoS, INSPEC and Scopus provided better quality indexing and better bibliographic records in terms of accuracy, control and granularity of information, when compared to GS and DBLP. WoS and Scopus also provided more sophisticated tools for measuring trends of scholarly publications.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Abrizah, A., Zainab, A. N., Kiran, K., & Raj, R. G. (2013). LIS journals scientific impact and subject categorization: A comparison between Web of Science and Scopus. Scientometrics, 94(2), 721–740.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Adriaanse, L. S., & Rensleigh, C. (2013). Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar a content comprehensiveness comparison. Electronic Library, 31(6), 727–744.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Aguillo, I. F. (2012). Is Google Scholar useful for bibliometrics? A webometric analysis. Scientometrics, 91(2), 343–351.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Archambault, É., Campbell, D., Gingras, Y., & Larivière, V. (2009). Comparing bibliometric statistics obtained from the Web of Science and Scopus. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(7), 1320–1326.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Archivio Istituzionale della Ricerca. (2014). Retrieved April 11, 2014 from http://air.unimi.it.articles/000553/article.pdf

  • Bakkalbasi, N., Bauer, K., Glover, J., & Wang, L. (2006). Three options for citation tracking: Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science. Biomedical Digital Libraries, 3(1), 7.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bar-Ilan, J. (2008). Which h-Index? A comparison of WoS, Scopus and Google Scholar. Scientometrics, 74, 257–271.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bar-Ilan, J. (2010). Citations to the “introduction to informetrics” indexed by WoS. Scopus and Google Scholar. Scientometrics, 82(3), 495–506.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bar-Ilan, J., Levene, M., & Lin, A. (2007). Some measures for comparing citation databases. Journal of Informetrics, 1, 26–34.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bartol, T., Budimir, G., Dekleva-Smrekar, D., Pusnik, M., & Juznic, P. (2014). Assessment of research fields in Scopus and Web of Science in the view of national research evaluation in Slovenia. Scientometrics, 98(2), 1491–1504.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bellini, E., & Nesi, P. (2013). Metadata quality assessment tool for open access cultural heritage institutional repositories.In Proceeding of the ECLAP 2013 Conference, 2nd International Conference on Information Technologies for performing arts, media access and entertainment, ECLAP 2013, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, LNCS 7990 (pp. 90–103) Springer.

  • Bosman, J., van Mourik, I., Rasch, M., Sieverts, E., & Verhoeff, H. (2006). Scopus reviewed and compared. The coverage and functionality of the citation database Scopus, including comparisons with Web of Science and Google Scholar, Utrecht: Utrecht University Library. Retrieved from http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/18247

  • Cassella, M., & Morando, M. (2012). Fostering new roles for librarians: Skills sets for repository managers—Results of a survey in Italy. LIBER Quarterly, 21, 407–428. Retrieved from http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/

  • De Sutter, B., & Van Den Oord, A. (2012). To be or not to be cited in Computer Science. Communications of the ACM, 55(8), 69–75.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • de Winter, J. C. F., Zadpoor, A. A., & Dodou, D. (2014). The expansion of Google Scholar versus Web of Science: A longitudinal study. Scientometrics, 98(2), 1547–1565.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fiala, D. (2012). Bibliometric analysis of CiteSeer data for countries. Information Processing and Management, 48(2), 242–253.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Franceschet, M. (2010). A comparison of bibliometric indicators for computer science scholars and journals on Web of Science and Google Scholar. Scientometrics, 83(1), 243–258.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freyne, J., Coyle, L., Smyth, B., & Cunningham, P. (2010). Relative status of journal and conference publications in Computer Science. Communications of the ACM, 53(11), 124–132.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gasparyan, A. Y., Ayvazyan, L., & Kitas, G. D. (2013). Multidisciplinary bibliographic databases. Journal of Korean Medical Science, 28(9), 1270–1275.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Giles, C. L., Bollacker, K. D., & Lawrence, S. (1998). CiteSeer: an automatic citation indexing system. Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Digital libraries: 89–98. doi:10.1145/276675.276685. ISBN 0-89791-965-3. CiteSeerX:10.1.1.30.6847.

  • González-Alcaide, G., Valderrama-Zurián, J. C., & Aleixandre-Benavent, R. (2012). The impact factor in non-English-speaking countries. Scientometrics, 92(2), 297–311.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gorraiz, J., & Schloegl, C. (2008). A bibliometric analysis of pharmacology and pharmacy journals: Scopus versus Web of Science. Journal of Information Science, 34(5), 715–725.

  • Kousha, K., & Thelwall, M. (2007). Google Scholar citations and Google Web/URL citations: A multi-discipline exploratory analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(7), 1055–1065.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ley, M. (2009). DBLP: Some lessons learned. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2(2), 1493–1500.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Liang, L., Rousseau, R., & Zhong, Z. (2013). Non-English journals and papers in physics and chemistry: Bias in citations? Scientometrics, 95(1), 333–350.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Meho, L., & Yang, K. (2007). Impact of data sources on citation counts and rankings of LIS faculty: Web of Science versus Scopus and Google Scholar. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(13), 2105–2125.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Orduña-Malea, E., Ayllón, J. M., Martín-Martín, A., & López-Cózar, E. D. (2014). Empirical evidences in citation-based search engines: Is microsoft academic search dead? Granada: EC3 Reports, 16: May 21, 2014. arXiv:1404.7045 [cs.DL]. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.7045

  • Palavitsinis, N., Manouselis, N., & Sanchez-Alonso, S. (2014). Metadata quality in digital repositories: Empirical results from the cross-domain transfer of a quality assurance process. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(6), 1202–1216.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Petricek, V., Cox, I. J., Han, H., Councill, I. G., & Giles, C. L. (2005). A comparison of on-line computer science citation databases. In A. Rauber, S. Christodoulakis, & A. M. Tjoa (Eds.) ECDL 2005. LNCS (vol. 3652, pp. 438–449). Heidelberg: Springer.

  • Sicilia, M., Sánchez-Alonso, S., & García-Barriocanal, E. (2011). Comparing impact factors from two different citation databases: The case of Computer Science. Journal of Informetrics, 5(4), 698–704.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Top Institutionals. (2014). Retrieved April 11, 2014 from http://repositories.webometrics.info/en/top_Inst?sort=asc&order=scholar

  • Ugoljni, D., & Casilli, C. (2003). The visibility of Italian journals. Scientometrics, 56(3), 345–355.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vieira, E. S., & Gomes, J. A. N. F. (2009). A comparison of Scopus and Web of Science for a typical university. Scientometrics, 81(2), 587–600.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wainer, J., Billa, C., & Goldenstein, S. (2011). Invisible work in standard bibliometric evaluation of Computer Science. Communications of the ACM, 54(5), 141–148.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Whitley, K. M. (2002). Analysis of SciFinder Scholar and Web of Science citation searches. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53(14), 1210–1215.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wolfram, D. (2003). Applied informetrics for information retrieval research. Westport: Libraries Unlimited Inc.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ze, H., & Bo, Y. (2012). Mining Google Scholar citations: An exploratory study. ICIC 2012, LNCS 7389, pp. 182–189.

  • Zhang, L. (2014). The impact of data source on the ranking of computer scientists based on citation indicators: A comparison of Web of Science and Scopus. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, 75. Retrieved from http://www.istl.org/14-winter/refereed2.html.

  • Zhang, L., & Glänzel, W. (2012). Proceeding papers in journals versus the “regular” journal publications. Journal of Informetrics, 6(1), 88–96.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, University of Milan, Via Comelico 39/41, 20135, Milan, Italy

    Antonio Cavacini

Authors
  1. Antonio Cavacini
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Antonio Cavacini.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Cavacini, A. What is the best database for computer science journal articles?. Scientometrics 102, 2059–2071 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1506-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1506-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation