文章基本信息

标题：Network-based statistical comparison of citation topology of bibliographic databases
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作者：Lovro Šubelj ; Dalibor Fiala ; Marko Bajec 等
期刊名称：Scientific Reports
电子版ISSN：2045-2322
出版年度：2014
卷号：4
DOI：10.1038/srep06496
出版社：Springer Nature
摘要：Modern bibliographic databases provide the basis for scientific research and its evaluation. While their content and structure differ substantially, there exist only informal notions on their reliability. Here we compare the topological consistency of citation networks extracted from six popular bibliographic databases including Web of Science , CiteSeer and arXiv.org . The networks are assessed through a rich set of local and global graph statistics. We first reveal statistically significant inconsistencies between some of the databases with respect to individual statistics. For example, the introduced field bow-tie decomposition of DBLP Computer Science Bibliography substantially differs from the rest due to the coverage of the database, while the citation information within arXiv.org is the most exhaustive. Finally, we compare the databases over multiple graph statistics using the critical difference diagram. The citation topology of DBLP Computer Science Bibliography is the least consistent with the rest, while, not surprisingly, Web of Science is significantly more reliable from the perspective of consistency. This work can serve either as a reference for scholars in bibliometrics and scientometrics or a scientific evaluation guideline for governments and research agencies.