Overlap in bibliographic databases

William W. Hood and Concepción S. Wilson

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2003, vol. 54, issue 12, 1091-1103

Abstract: Bibliographic databases contain surrogates to a particular subset of the complete set of literature; some databases are very narrow in their scope, while others are multidisciplinary. These databases overlap in their coverage of the literature to a greater or lesser extent. The topic of Fuzzy Set Theory is examined to determine the overlap of coverage in the databases that index this topic. It was found that about 63% of records in the data set are unique to only one database, and the remaining 37% are duplicated in from two to 12 different databases. The overlap distribution is found to conform to a Lotka‐type plot. The records with maximum overlap are identified; however, further work is needed to determine the significance of the high level of overlap in these records. The unique records are plotted using a Bradford‐type form of data presentation and are found to conform (visually) to a hyperbolic distribution. The extent and causes of intra‐database duplication (records duplicated in the one database) are also examined. Finally, the overlap in the top databases in the dataset were examined, and a high correlation was found between overlapping records, and overlapping DIALOG OneSearch categories.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.10301

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:54:y:2003:i:12:p:1091-1103

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().