Quantifying the consistency of scientific databases

Abstract

Science is a social process with far-reaching impact on our modern society. In recent years, for the first time we are able to scientifically study the science itself. This is enabled by massive amounts of data on scientific publications that is increasingly becoming available. The data is contained in several databases such as Web of Science or PubMed, maintained by various public and private entities. Unfortunately, these databases are not always consistent, which considerably hinders this study. Relying on the powerful framework of complex networks, we conduct a systematic analysis of the consistency among six major scientific databases. We found that identifying a single "best" database is far from easy. Nevertheless, our results indicate appreciable differences in mutual consistency of different databases, which we interpret as recipes for future bibliometric studies.