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Accuracy of funding information in Scopus: a comparative case study

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Abstract

As an emerging bibliographic database, Scopus is increasingly used in academic research and evaluation practice. Compared with Web of Science, its data quality/reliability is still relatively underexplored. By using the author’s twenty-six English papers published during 2014 and 2019, this case study probes the accuracy of funding information in Scopus and shows that the accuracy of funding information collected by Web of Science is better than that of Scopus. Some obvious errors in funding acknowledgement text and funding agency fields still exist in Scopus. Therefore, Scopus needs to optimize the funding acknowledgement text identification method and improve the funding agency extraction and standardization strategy.

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Notes

  1. This study finds that Scopus updates its data frequently. For example, when the author retrieved the funding information for article #21 on 11th March, 2020, all of the funding information was correct. However, when the author rechecked the data 1 day later, some funding agency information disappeared. To be consistent, this study only keeps all the data retrieved on 11th March for analysis.

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Acknowledgements

This research is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (#71801189 and #71904168), Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (#LQ18G030010 and #LQ18G010005) and the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of the Ministry of Education of China (#19YJC630101). The author takes full responsibility for any errors.

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  1. School of Information Management and Engineering, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, Hangzhou, 310018, Zhejiang, China

    Weishu Liu

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  1. Weishu Liu
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Correspondence to Weishu Liu.

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Liu, W. Accuracy of funding information in Scopus: a comparative case study. Scientometrics 124, 803–811 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03458-w

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