Software issues related to cited references

The underlying software issue related to cited references is the capability of the software to identify the specific work cited by a reference, and associate it with the correct author and journal. This paper aims to investigate this issue and to discuss the latest editions of Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus.

In this paper the strengths and weaknesses of the Distinct Author Set feature of WoS and the Author Details feature of Scopus are discussed.

The paper reveals that these tools will have an increasingly important role in refining the process of disambiguating author (and journal) names in calculating their h‐index.

The paper provides useful information on software issues related to cited references and on the Distinct Author Set feature of WoS and the Author Details feature of Scopus.