Comparison of Citation Indexes in Korea: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Citation indexes are essential data sources for bibliometric analysis of research performance. However, the international coverage of popular citation indexes such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar is minimal since very few non-English publications are included in those indexes. Thus, one must look to Korean citation indexes for proper bibliometric assessment of research in Korea, rather than relying on conventional indexes that contain only a fraction of scholarly publications by Korean authors. Since the evaluative outcome of bibliometric analysis is only as reliable as the data from which they are drawn, the examination of Korean citation indexes is vital to establishing an effective approach to bibliometric analysis of research performance in Korea. The paper presents a study that investigates three key citation indexes in Korea, namely Korea Science Citation Index (KSCI), Korea Citation Index (KCI), and Korea Medical Citation Index (KoMCI). The study compares the impact factors of the journals covered by all three databases, where journals with large impact factors differences across citation indexes are selected for closer inspection in order to discover the causes of discrepancy. The study found the coverage difference to be the major cause of the discrepancy, followed by incomplete and inaccurate extraction of citations as well as different data exclusion criteria, thus highlighting the problem areas that Korean citation indexes need to address.