A matter of time: publication dates in Web of Science Core Collection

Weishu Liu ()
Additional contact information
Weishu Liu: Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics

Scientometrics, 2021, vol. 126, issue 1, No 40, 849-857

Abstract: Abstract Web of Science Core Collection, one of the most authoritative bibliographic databases, is widely used in academia to track high-quality research. This database has begun to index online-first articles since December 2017. This new practice has introduced two different publication dates (online and final publication dates) into the database for more and more early access publications. It may confuse many users who want to search or analyze literature by using the publication-year related tools provided by Web of Science Core Collection. By developing custom retrieval strategies and checking manually, this study finds that the “year published” field in search page searches in both online and final publication date fields of indexed records. Each indexed record is allocated to only one “publication year” on the left of the search results page which will inherit first from online publication date field even when the online publication date is later than the final publication date. The “publication year” field in the results analysis page and the timespan “custom year range” field in the search page have the same function as that of the filter “publication year” in search results page. The potential impact of the availability of two different publication dates in calculating bibliometric indicators is also discussed at the end of the article.

Keywords: Early access; Publication date; Web of Science Core Collection; Science Citation Index; Bibliometric analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-020-03697-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:scient:v:126:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-020-03697-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-020-03697-x

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().