@misc{10481/93676,
year = {2024},
month = {3},
url = {https://hdl.handle.net/10481/93676},
abstract = {Authorship is associated with scientific capital and prestige, and corresponding authorship is
used in evaluation as a proxy for scientific status. However, there are no empirical analyses on
the validity of the corresponding authorship metadata in bibliometric databases. This paper
looks at differences in the corresponding authorship metadata in Web of Science (WoS) and
Scopus to investigate how the relationship between author position and corresponding authors
varies by discipline and country and analyzes changes in the position of corresponding
authors over time. We find that both WoS and Scopus have accuracy issues when it comes to
assigning corresponding authorship. Although the number of documents with a reprint author
has increased over time in both databases, WoS indexed more of those papers than Scopus,
and there are significant differences between the two databases in terms of who the
corresponding author is. Although metadata is not complete in WoS, corresponding
authors are normally first authors with a declining trend over time, favoring middle and last
authors, especially in the Medical, Natural Sciences, and Engineering fields. These
results reinforce the importance of considering how databases operationalize and index
concepts such as corresponding authors, this being particularly important when they are used
in research assessment.},
organization = {Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation
(RESPONSIBLE project PID2021-128429NB-I00 and COMPARE project PID2020-
117007RA-I00)},
organization = {Ramón y Cajal grant from the Spanish
Ministry of Science and Innovation (REF: RYC2019-027886-I)},
publisher = {MIT Press Direct},
keywords = {bibliographic data sources},
keywords = {corresponding author},
keywords = {research evaluation},
title = {Examining the quality of the corresponding authorship field in Web of Science and Scopus},
doi = {10.1162/qss_a_00288},
author = {Chinchilla-Rodríguez, Zaida and Costas, Rodrigo and Robinson-Garcia, Nicolas and Larivière, Vincent},
}