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Diversity is one of the main characteristics of modern societies. To be teachers and trainers, it is necessary to use all the tools to respond to students with diversified needs. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to review the scientific production in Web of Science (WOS) and SCOPUS of 1996-2019 on the application of Virtual reality in people with Autism Spectrum Disoders (ASD) for the improvement of social skills.

For this purpose, two databases have been used: The Web of Science (WOS) and SCOPUS from the advanced search tab. After applying the search terms, 267 documents were obtained which were analysed according to a series of indicators.

The results indicate that the period 2016-2019 was the most productive and that SCOPUS has a focus on conferences and WOS is intended for journals. Furthermore, in SCOPUS, there are journals with higher quartiles (Q1) than in WOS. The study shows the great importance of virtual reality in people with ASD and its recent dissemination.

Currently, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no studies on the use of virtual reality in people with ASD using bibliometric indicators. The study allows us to know which databases publish higher quality research. Likewise, information can be obtained about the most productive centres and the most important authors on the subject.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the pros and cons of computing the h‐index using Scopus.

The paper looks at the content features and the software capabilities of Scopus from the perspective of computing a reasonable h‐index for scholars.

Although there are limitations in the content, and even in the mostly excellent, swift, powerful and innovative software of Scopus, it can produce a much more reliable and reproducible h‐index – at least for relatively junior researchers – than Google Scholar.

The paper adds insight into computing the h‐index using Scopus.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, the study aims to investigate the relationship between the altmetric indicators from ResearchGate (RG) and the bibliometric indicators from the Scopus database. Second, the study seeks to examine the relationship amongst the RG altmetric indicators themselves. RG is a rich source of altmetric indicators such as Citations, RGScore, Impact Points, Profile Views, Publication Views, etc.

For establishing whether RG metrics showed the same results as the established sources of metrics, Pearson’s correlation coefficients were calculated between the metrics provided by RG and the metrics obtained from Scopus. Pearson’s correlation coefficients were also calculated for the metrics provided by RG. The data were collected by visiting the profile pages of all the members who had an account in RG under the Department of Physics, Panjab University, Chandigarh (India).

The study showed that most of the RG metrics showed strong positive correlation with the Scopus metrics, except for RGScore (RG) and Citations (Scopus), which showed moderate positive correlation. It was also found that the RG metrics showed moderate to strong positive correlation amongst each other.

The limitation of this study is that more and more scientists and researchers may join RG in the future, therefore the data may change. The study focuses on the members who had an account in RG under the Department of Physics, Panjab University, Chandigarh (India). Perhaps further studies can be conducted by increasing the sample size and by taking a different sample size having different characteristics.

Being an emerging field, not much has been conducted in the area of altmetrics. Very few studies have been conducted on the reach of academic social networks like RG and their validity as sources of altmetric indicators like RGScore, Impact Points, etc. The findings offer insights to the question whether RG can be used as an alternative to traditional sources of bibliometric indicators, especially with reference to a rapidly developing country such as India.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the research impact of the National Research Foundation (NRF)-rated researchers’ output at the North-West University (NWU), South Africa, from 2006 to 2017.

The study used bibliometrics and altmetrics methods to determine the production of research outputs and the impact of NWU’s NRF-rated researchers’ publications. Various tools including Google Scholar (GS), Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, ResearchGate (RG) and Mendeley were used to collect data. The citations in the three bibliographic databases were used as proxy for academic impact, while reads and readerships in RG and Mendeley were used to determine societal impact of the researchers. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to test the relationship between citations in the three bibliographic databases and reads and readerships in RG and Mendeley.

The main findings were that the majority of NWU’s NRF-rated researchers’ publications emanated from GS, followed by Scopus and then WoS. GS output also had more citations. There were 6,026 research outputs in RG which were read for 676,919 times and 5,850 in Mendeley with 142,621 readerships. Correlations between RG and all three bibliographic databases’ citations were scant. Strong relationships between the three bibliographic databases’ citations and Mendeley readerships were found.

Academic librarians who interact with researchers who would like to predict future academic impact of their documents can be advised to consider Mendeley readerships with some level of confidence compared to RG reads. These results point to the importance of constant self-evaluation by researchers to ensure that they have balanced profiles across the three main bibliographic databases that are also considered for ratings. These results point to the relevancy of GS to evaluate research beyond the academy.

The fact that researchers are contributing research that seeks to improve the general welfare of the population (beyond the academy) is a positive sign as society look up to researchers and research to solve their socio-economic problems. Social media play an important role as they serve as indicators that indicators point to wider research impacts and wider access by many different groups of people including the members of society at large. They point to research that is accessible to not only researchers and those who have access to their research but also the society at large.

Although the practice of rating researchers is common in different research ecosystems, the researchers could not find any evidence of studies conducted using a combination of bibliometrics and altmetrics to asses rated researchers’ output. This study covers and compares social impact based on data obtained from two academic social media sites and three main bibliographic databases (GS, Scopus and WoS).

The purpose of this paper is to identify the utility of Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar as citation analysis tools for the social sciences.

The 25 most‐accessed articles in 163 social sciences journals are searched in three citation databases.

Web of Science has long been the only tool for citation analysis. Scopus and Google Scholar, while still new to the market, are complementary to Web of Science and in some cases can provide a more nuanced view of the importance of scholarly articles in the social sciences.

As libraries struggle to provide the best tools to their users, they may wish to consider the freely‐available Google Scholar as a substitute or complement to expensive databases such as Web of Science and Scopus.

Most analyses of citation databases have focused on the sciences. Because this study examined the social sciences literature, it has expanded on the research available on Web of Science, Google Scholar and Scopus.

The purpose of this research is to provide the scientific community with some quantitative data of relevance to the evaluation of two major citation databases. In addition, various aspects of the methodology of database coverage comparisons are discussed.

Calculations of the overlaps between the journal lists of Web of Science and Scopus and some other major scientific databases are presented.

The results provide some measures of the overall title coverage as well as the amount of unique material in the sources studied.

The journal title overlap calculations are based on journal lists provided by the database producers rather than searches in the databases themselves. Any inaccuracies in the lists may be reflected in the results. Also, the lists do not provide any information about the depth and consistency of the coverage. The nature of possible error sources is discussed.

The methodology chosen allows comparatively quick comparisons between the contents of databases. This makes it suitable for analysis of trends in database coverage.

The research aim for this study was to compare three citation resources with one another to identify the citation resource with the most representative South African scholarly environmental sciences citation coverage. This paper focuses on the results of the content verification process which measured amongst others the citation counts, multiple copies and inconsistencies encountered across the three citation resources ISI Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar.

The research, the first phase of a longitudinal study, used a comparative research design method with a purposive, non-probability sample. Data from the South African scholarly environmental sciences journals for the year range 2004-2008 (first phase) were extracted from the three citation resources and compared.

It became evident during the verification process that the citation resources retrieved varied results. The total citation counts indicated that ISI Web of Science (WOS) retrieved the most citation results, followed by Google Scholar (GS) and then Scopus. WOS performed the best with total coverage of the journal sample population and also retrieved the most unique items. The investigation into multiple copies indicated that WOS and Scopus retrieved no duplicates, while GS retrieved multiple copies. Scopus delivered the least inconsistencies regarding content verification and content quality compared to the other two citation resources. Additionally, GS also retrieved the most inconsistencies, with WOS retrieving more inconsistencies than Scopus. Examples of these inconsistencies include author spelling and sequence, volume and issue number.

The findings of the study contribute to the understanding of the completeness of citation results retrieved from different citation resources. In addition it will raise awareness amongst academics to check citations of their work.

The h‐index has been used to evaluate research productivity and impact (as manifested by the number of publications and the number of citations received) at many levels of aggregations for various targets. The purpose of this paper is to examine the bibliometric characteristics of the largest multidisciplinary databases that are the most widely used for measuring research productivity and impact.

The paper presents preliminary findings about the Scopus database. It is to be complemented and contrasted by the bibliometric profile of the Web of Science (WoS) database.

The test results showed that 18.7 million Scopus records had one or more cited references, representing 42 per cent of the entire database content. The ratio of cited reference enhanced records kept slightly increasing year by year from 1996 to 2009. Scopus classifies the journals and other serial sources into 27 broad subject areas by assigning its journals to 21 science disciplines, four social science disciplines, a single Arts and Humanities category, and/or a multidisciplinary category. The distribution of records among the broad subject areas can be searched in Scopus using the four‐character codes of the subject areas. A journal or a single primary document may be assigned to more than one subject area. However, Scopus overdoes this, and it significantly distorts the h‐index for the broad subject areas. The h‐index of the pre‐1996 subset of records for the 21,066,019 documents published before 1996 is 1,451, i.e. there are records for 1,451 documents in that subset that were cited more than 1,450 times. The total number of citations received by these 1,451 papers (i.e. the h‐core, representing the number of items that contribute to the h‐index) is 4,416,488, producing an average citation rate of 3,044 citations per item in the h‐core of the pre‐1996 subset of the entire Scopus database. For the subset providing records for 23,455,354 documents published after 1995, the h‐index is 1,339, so the total number of citations must be at least 1,792,921. In reality the total number of citations received by these papers is 3,903,157, yielding a citation rate of 2,915 citations per document in the h‐core. For the entire Scopus database of 44.5 million records the h‐index is 1,757.

Knowing the bibliometric features of databases, their own h‐index and related metrics versus those of the alternative tools can be very useful for computing a variety of research performance indicators. However, we need to learn much more about our tools in our rush to metricise everything before we can rest assured that our gauges gauge correctly or at least with transparent limitations. Learning the bibliometric profile of the tools used to measure the research performance of researchers, departments, universities and journals can help in making better informed decisions, and discovering the limitations of the measuring tools.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the new version of the Web of Science (WoS) software.

This paper discusses the new version of the Web of Science (WoS) software.

The new version of the Web of Science (WoS) software released in mid‐2011 eliminated the 100,000‐record limit in the search results. This, in turn, makes it possible to study the bibliometric profile of the entire WoS database (which consists of 50 million unique records), and/or any subset licensed by a library. In addition the maximum record set for the automatic production of the informative citation report was doubled from 5,000 to 10,000 records. These are important developments for getting a realistic picture of WoS, and gauging the most widely used gauge. It also helps in comparing WoS with the Scopus database using traceable and reproducible quantitative measures, including the h‐index and its variants, the citation rate of the documents making up the h‐core (the set of records that contribute to the h‐index), and computing additional bibliometric indicators that can be used as proxies in evaluating the research performance of individuals, research groups, educational and research institutions as well as serial publications for the broadest subject areas and time span – although with some limitations and reservations.

This paper, which attempts to describe some of the bibliometric traits of WoS in three different configurations (in terms of the composition and time span of the components licensed), complements the one published in a previous issue of Online Information Review profiling the Scopus database.

The four major Subject Repositories (SRs), arXiv, Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and PubMed Central (PMC), are all important within their disciplines but no previous study has systematically compared how often they are cited in academic publications. In response, the purpose of this paper is to report an analysis of citations to SRs from Scopus publications, 2000-2013.

Scopus searches were used to count the number of documents citing the four SRs in each year. A random sample of 384 documents citing the four SRs was then visited to investigate the nature of the citations.

Each SR was most cited within its own subject area but attracted substantial citations from other subject areas, suggesting that they are open to interdisciplinary uses. The proportion of documents citing each SR is continuing to increase rapidly, and the SRs all seem to attract substantial numbers of citations from more than one discipline.

Scopus does not cover all publications, and most citations to documents found in the four SRs presumably cite the published version, when one exists, rather than the repository version.

SRs are continuing to grow and do not seem to be threatened by institutional repositories and so research managers should encourage their continued use within their core disciplines, including for research that aims at an audience in other disciplines.

This is the first simultaneous analysis of Scopus citations to the four most popular SRs.