A matter of time: publication dates in Web of Science Core Collection
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A matter of time: publication dates in Web of Science Core Collection Weishu Liu1 Received: 10 August 2020 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract Web of Science Core Collection, one of the most authoritative bibliographic databases, is widely used in academia to track high-quality research. This database has begun to index online-first articles since December 2017. This new practice has introduced two different publication dates (online and final publication dates) into the database for more and more early access publications. It may confuse many users who want to search or analyze literature by using the publication-year related tools provided by Web of Science Core Collection. By developing custom retrieval strategies and checking manually, this study finds that the “year published” field in search page searches in both online and final publication date fields of indexed records. Each indexed record is allocated to only one “publication year” on the left of the search results page which will inherit first from online publication date field even when the online publication date is later than the final publication date. The “publication year” field in the results analysis page and the timespan “custom year range” field in the search page have the same function as that of the filter “publication year” in search results page. The potential impact of the availability of two different publication dates in calculating bibliometric indicators is also discussed at the end of the article. Keywords Early access · Publication date · Web of Science Core Collection · Science Citation Index · Bibliometric analysis
Introduction Recently, Krauskopf (2019) has found a large gap between the number of papers published by the journal Enfermeria Nefrologica and the ones actually indexed by Scopus. Inspired by this study, we search the publications published by the journal Scientometrics and indexed by another widely used database Web of Science Core Collection (Li et al. 2018; Zhu and Liu 2020). We also find that 396, 398, and 332 records are indexed for the “publication years” 2017, 2018, and 2019 respectively (refined by “publication years” in search results page). By referring to the publisher’s webpage and counting the number of * Weishu Liu [email protected] 1
School of Information Management and Engineering, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, Hangzhou 310018, Zhejiang, China
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Scientometrics
records published in each issue, we find that 400, 401, and 307 records were published by Scientometrics in 2017, 2018, and 2019 respectively. The numbers of records published by Scientometrics in 2017 and 2018 are similar for two different data sources. However, it is interesting to find that 25 more records were published by Scientometrics in 2019 according to Web of Science Core Collection than the number counted from the journal publisher’s website. We are curious about the true meaning of the filter “publication years” in search results page. Previous studies have investigated multi-
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