The data source of this study is Web of Science Core Collection? Not enough

Abstract

Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science Core Collection, a comprehensive database consisting of ten sub-datasets, is increasingly applied in academic research across over two hundred Web of Science categories. 271 English language SCIE and SSCI papers published in 2017–2018 from the category of Information Science and Library Science have mentioned “Web of Science” in the topic field. A manual check of the full texts of these papers reveals that 243 of them have used “Web of Science Core Collection” as the data source but over half of them haven’t specified the sub-datasets of Web of Science Core Collection used in the study. Since many institutions may only subscribe to a customized subset of the whole core collection, the non-transparency of the data source will hinder the reproducibility of some corresponding studies. This study suggests that researchers should specify the sub-datasets and corresponding coverage timespans when using Web of Science Core Collection as the data source.