Evaluation of the citation matching algorithms of CWTS and i FQ in comparison to the W eb of science

Abstract

The results of bibliometric studies provided by bibliometric research groups, for example, the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) and the Institute for Research Information and Quality Assurance (iFQ), are often used in the process of research assessment. Their databases use Web of Science (WoS) citation data, which they match according to their own matching algorithms—in the case of CWTS for standard usage in their studies and in the case of iFQ on an experimental basis. Because the problem of nonmatched citations in the WoS persists due to inaccuracies in the references or inaccuracies introduced in the data extraction process, it is important to ascertain how well these inaccuracies are rectified in these citation matching algorithms. This article evaluates the algorithms of CWTS and iFQ in comparison to the WoS in a quantitative and a qualitative analysis. The analysis builds upon the method and the manually verified corpus of a previous study. The algorithm of CWTS performs best, closely followed by that of iFQ. The WoS algorithm still performs quite well (F1 score: 96.41%), but shows deficits in matching references containing inaccuracies. An additional problem is posed by incorrectly provided cited reference information in source articles by the WoS.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 56 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.