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Systematic analysis of coverage and usage of conference proceedings in web of science

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Abstract

The role of conference proceedings for scientific communication varies among the different research fields. It is thus difficult to determine how to use them in bibliometric studies that cover all or at least a variety of the research fields without favouring or penalizing observation subjects that are specialized in fields that rely heavily on conference proceedings. Also, the coverage of conference proceedings in bibliometric databases is often unclear. Not only have there been reports of misclassification but also of insufficient coverage. In this study, the Web of Science is used to give an overview of coverage of conference proceedings as well as advantages and pitfalls of their usage in bibliometric analyses. In particular, the focus lies on different citation behaviour of and for conference proceedings and the implications for bibliometric indicators. This is complemented by an investigation of the development of coverage and publication behaviour in conference proceedings which is compared to those of journal publications. Finally, the importance but also drawbacks and opportunities of acknowledging conference proceedings publications for bibliometric studies are summarized.

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Notes

  1. "Working with ISI data: Beware of Categorisation Problems", Anne-Wil Harzing, http://www.harzing.com/ISI_categories.htm, last accessed on 2012/10/18.

  2. See definitions in the next subsection.

  3. Analyzed time period were the years 1994 to 2002.

  4. These statements could not be corroborated with our findings though. The average citation age of articles lay between 5.6 (in 2000) and 2.7 (in 2007) years, while that for conference proceedings diminished from 4.9 (in 2000) to 2.6 (in 2007) years.

  5. A finding that we were able to corroborate in "Results" section.

  6. However, we will see later that even with an update in spring 2012, the year 2010 is not completely covered in the database.

  7. Additionally, to parallel the search strategy for the journal publications, we included the document types review and letter in the CPCI as well. In practice, this results in 10 more “conference proceedings” (all of the original type “review”) in the whole observation period.

  8. In the case of equal publication years it cannot be distinguished between original publication and resubmission. This does not affect our analysis overall because basically we know that both submissions were published by the same author with the same title and are thus duplicates and that is all we need. Nonetheless, we had to take this into account when calculating the numbers of resubmitted publications because otherwise the two publications of the same document type would have been counted as resubmitted publications as well as resubmissions.

  9. Note that we are referring to the version of the WoS that is sold for inhouse usage by Thomson Reuters as stated in "Methodology" section.

  10. In absolute numbers, 2008 has 7 conference proceedings less than 2007.

  11. See e.g. http://wcica12.amss.ac.cn/history, accessed on 2012/11/21.

  12. To check if the database coverage introduced any biases, we manually classified the references of a random sample set of conference proceedings. The sample set covered 150 publications in Computer Science and 150 in other fields in 2010. According to the sample set approximately 4 % of the references in other fields and 5 % of those in Computer Science target conference proceedings. Thus, the numbers presented in Fig. 2 are even slightly higher than expected—despite the alleged lower coverage of conference proceedings in the database. However, the results also show that the field dependencies concerning the publication outlets are only lightly reflected in the references.

  13. Considering that one conference proceedings could be counted multiple times because it was referred to more than once, this is not comparable to the actual publication numbers but should be rather seen as measure of the database effect.

  14. Note that this is the lower bound for these numbers. If we also considered variations in the title, the numbers would probably be higher. However, an exact match of the title is the most precise method for identifying duplicates in the database.

  15. The ESWC, an acronym that first stood for "European Semantic Web Conference", was redefined to "Extended Semantic Web Conference" in 2010.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Carolin Michels & Jun-Ying Fu

  2. Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC), Beijing, China

    Jun-Ying Fu

Authors
  1. Carolin Michels
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  2. Jun-Ying Fu
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Correspondence to Carolin Michels.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 11 Conferences that appear in the top 10 publication sources in the CPCI from 2000 to 2010
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Michels, C., Fu, JY. Systematic analysis of coverage and usage of conference proceedings in web of science. Scientometrics 100, 307–327 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1309-4

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