Publications

OpenAlex is a promising open source of scholarly metadata, and competitor to established proprietary sources, such as the Web of Science and Scopus. As OpenAlex provides its data freely and openly, it permits researchers to perform bibliometric studies that can be reproduced in the community without licensing barriers. However, as OpenAlex is a rapidly evolving source and the data contained within is expanding and also quickly changing, the question naturally arises as to the trustworthiness of its data. In this report, we will study the reference coverage and selected metadata within each database and compare them with each other to help address this open question in bibliometrics. [...]

The Trend Survey Research Data Infrastructures 2024 is part of the accompanying research of the Basic Services for the National Research Data Infrastructure (Base4NFDI). The trend survey captures the perception, use and evaluation of established and new data infrastructures and services in the German research landscape. The focus in on the perspective of (potential) users.

Author self-citations are a somewhat controversial phenomenon. Some scholars maintain they are a normal, even indispensable, part of scientific referencing practice, while others claim they are frequently an expression of vanity and self-promotion. Citations are the basic data for citation network clustering, an important approach to creating bottom-up, data-driven, global taxonomic systems of research publications. Thus the topical information content of self-citations is of particular interest in this context. [...]