Exploring the Publication Metadata Fields in Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions: Possibilities and Ease of doing Scientometric Analysis

Publication of a large number of research papers during the last few decades motivated creation of scholarly databases for indexing the publications and recording citations. The publication metadata fields in scholarly databases are now retrieved for various purposes ranging from information search and retrieval to research evaluation. Traditionally, Web of Science and Scopus have been major database sources used. However, with the creation of newer databases like Dimensions, the choice has expanded further. The coverage and citation data of the major databases have been compared in many previous studies. However, there is no existing work on comparison of metadata fields provided by the scholarly databases and the impact that metadata fields provided may have on scientometric research. This work, therefore, attempts to bridge this research gap by comparing the metadata fields contained in the data downloaded through the User Interface (UI) based search from three major scholarly databases-Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions. The effect of existence or absence of a metadata field in a database on the possibilities and the ease of doing scientometric analysis is explored. The findings are useful for scientometric researchers, practitioners and database managers.