Abstract
A truebounded publication list of a scientific author consists of exactly all publications that meet two criteria: (1) they are formally published (e.g., journal article or proceeding paper); (2) they have scientific, scholarly, or academic content. A publication list is overbounded if it includes documents which do not meet the two criteria (such as novels); a publication list is underbounded if it is incomplete. Are authors’ personal publication lists, found on their personal sites on the Internet or in institutional repositories, truebounded, overbounded, or underbounded? And are the respective publication lists generated through bibliographic information services truebounded, overbounded, or underbounded? As case studies, publications of nine International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) Committee members (published between 2007 and 2016) were collected to create preferably complete personal publication lists according to the two criteria. We connect the “relative visibility of an author” with the concepts of truebounded, overbounded, and underbounded publication lists. The authors’ relative visibility values were determined for the information services Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Google Scholar and compared to the relative visibility of the authors’ personal publication lists. All results of the bibliographic information services are underbounded. Relative visibility is highest in Google Scholar, followed by Scopus and WoS.
Highlights
Many studies on the measurement of research outputs are based on publication counts of scientists, institutions, cities, countries, and topics
To determine the state of boundedness, we address the measure of relative visibility [2]
We investigated nine authors of the International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) Scientific Committee in order to determine their relative visibility in Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Google Scholar as well as in their personal publication lists as case studies
Summary
Many studies on the measurement of research outputs are based on publication counts of scientists, institutions, cities, countries, and topics. Common scientometric indicators are scientific productivity (by the measure of publication counts), scientific impact (by the measure of citation counts), and mentions in social media (by the measures provided by altmetrics). The basic indicator is the publication count which determines the scientist’s, the institution’s, etc. A publication has to be visible in order to be cited; it has to be visible as well in order to be mentioned on any social media. The quality of all mentioned measures depends on the completeness of the unit of assessment’s publication list. We introduce an indicator for the analysis and evaluation of publication lists: boundedness. The boundedness of publication lists consists of three manifestations:
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