OpenAlex and Crossref as alternative bibliographic data sources to Web of Science and Scopus in healthcare sciences

Abstract

Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus are the main preferred data sources for obtaining bibliographic information in research evaluation processes. However, recently, new sources claiming to provide greater coverage have emerged. This study aims to analyze the coverage of scientific production in health sciences at the journal and publisher level in Crossref, WoS and Scopus, and at the level of indexed articles, citation counts and data quality in OpenAlex, WoS and Scopus. Overcoming the lack of definitive interfaces from Crossref and OpenAlex, multiple queries will be made to their APIs. The results show that Crossref indexes more titles than WoS (+18%) and Scopus (+14%) and has a greater editorial representativeness. OpenAlex also offers greater coverage of indexed articles and citation counts than WoS and Scopus in a sample of articles, with a very similar article metadata indexing quality.