Altmetric measurements derived from the social web are increasingly advocated and used as early indicators of article impact and usefulness. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic scientific evidence that altmetrics are valid proxies of either impact or utility although a few case studies have reported medium correlations between specific altmetrics and citation rates for individual journals or fields. Finally, the coverage of all the altmetrics except for Twitter seems to be low and so it is not clear if they are prevalent enough to be useful in practice.
In this post, we provide empirical insights into the value of Crossref as a new source of citation data. We compare Crossref with WoS and Scopus, focusing on the citation data that is available in the different data sources. Our analysis will show that more than three-quarters of the references in WoS and more than two-thirds of the Scopus references can be found in Crossref, with about half of these references being openly available. On the other hand, it will also be shown that millions of references are missing in Crossref. These references occur in publications that have been deposited in Crossref without their references.
For more than 40 years, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, now part of
Thomson-Reuters), produced the only available database making possible citation
analysis, the Web of Science (WoS). Now, another company, Reed-Elsevier, has created
its own bibliographic database, Scopus, available since 2002. For those who perform
bibliometric analysis and comparisons of countries or institutions, the existence of these
two major databases raises the important question of the comparability and stability of
rankings obtained from different data sources
Crossref makes research outputs easy to find, cite, link, and assess. We’re a not-for-profit membership organization that exists to make scholarly communications better.