How are exclusively data journals indexed in major scholarly databases? An examination of four databases
Scientific Data, vol. 10, pp. 737
Abstract
The data paper is becoming a popular way for researchers to publish their research data. The growing numbers of data papers and journals hosting them have made them an important data source for understanding how research data is published and reused. One barrier to this research agenda is a lack of knowledge as to how data journals and their publications are indexed in the scholarly databases used for quantitative analysis. To address this gap, this study examines how a list of 18 exclusively data journals (i.e., journals that primarily accept data papers) are indexed in four popular scholarly databases: the Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, and OpenAlex. We investigate how comprehensively these databases cover the selected data journals and, in particular, how they present the document type information of data papers. We find that the coverage of data papers, as well as their document type information, is highly inconsistent across databases, which creates major challenges for future efforts to study them quantitatively, which should be addressed in the future.
Authors 3
-
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Affiliation as printed
School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 501 E. Daniel St., Champaign, IL, 61820, USA
-
Kai Li corresponding
University of Tennessee at Knoxville
Affiliation as printed
School of Information Sciences, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 451 Communications Building 1345 Circle Park Drive, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA. kli16@utk.edu
School of Information Sciences, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 451 Communications Building 1345 Circle Park Drive, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA
-
Leiden University · Renmin University of China
Affiliation as printed
Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, Kolffpad 1, 2333 BN, Leiden, the Netherlands
School of Information Resource Management, Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872, China
Cited by 36 stored of 36
No patents citing this paper on Lens.org (checked 2026-10-11).