For the assessment of scientific research
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Citation databases provide information on the quality, quantity and impact of scientific publications, based on the use of bibliometric indexes.
The most important bibliometric indexes are the Impact Factor for journals, and the H-Index for authors.
TheImpact Factor, developed in 1955 by Eugene Garfield, measures theimpact of a journal in a specific disciplinary field, by calculating the average number of citations received by the articles in the journal over the two previous years.
TheH-Index (or Hirsch Index, from the name of the Argentinian physicist who invented it in 2005) is an index that measures the productivity of an author on the basis of the number of publications or the number of citations received.
The University of Ferrara subscribes to the two main international citation databases: Scopus from Elsevier and Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics.
- Scopus
Established in 2004, Scopus from Elsevier is a bibliographical and citation database equipped with tools for the assessment of scientific research through the use of bibliometric indicators
The database indexes over 18,000 titles from around 5,000 international publishers, including:
- 16,500 peer-reviewed journals, of which over 1,200 are open access
- 600 commercial publications
- 350 series
- numerous conference proceedings (for a total of around 3.6 million papers).
The geographical scope is global, with the majority of data coming from the European area, and over 20% of sources in languages other than English.
The database contains millions of bibliographical records, half of which pertain to publications from before 1996 (back as far as 1823), with the other half made up of more recent publications (78% of which are complete with a bibliography). 80% of the records also include an abstract.
As well as publications, Scopus indexes web resources, including:
- web pages with scientific content
- patents from the following organisations: US Patent and Trademark Office, European Patent Office, Japan Patent Office, World Intellectual Property Organization and UK Intellectual Property Office
- articles in press (not yet published) from over 3,000 journals from various publishers
- institutional repositories and digital archives.
The database is multi-disciplinary, in the sense that it covers the scientific, technical and medical sectors (with 100% coverage of Medline) and social sciences (including humanities).
- Web of Science
Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics is a bibliographical research platform that facilitates simultaneous searches of bibliographical records of journal articles, monographs, individual contributions in miscellaneous volumes, conference proceedings, reviews etc, contained in different international and regional databases, some dedicated to a specific discipline, and others to particular types of documents.
The following databases are included in the Unife subscription, with their respective timespan coverage.
- Science Citation Index (SCIE) 1970-
- Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) 1970-
- Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) 1970-
- Conf. Proc. Citation Index (CPCI) 1990-
- Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) 2015-
- Medline 1950-
- SciELO 2002-
- Russian Citation Index (RCI) 2005-
- Korean Journal Database (KJD) 1980-
- WOK Citation Connection back years 2009-2014
- Journal and Highly Cited Data 1997-
Web of Science also includes Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which are useful for understanding the IMPACT FACTOR of the journals indexed in the Citation Indexes searchable with WoS, and to find bibliometric indicators such as the number of citations (Citation Index) or the Hirsch Index (H-Index), which measures the impact of authors within the scientific community of reference, on the basis of the number of publications and the number of citations received.
Important! It is only possible to download full text documents from WoS if they are open access or published in electronic journals subscribed to by Unife and consultable from the catalogue Electronic resources A-Z.