Assessing and Comparing the Coverage of Publications of Italian Universities in OpenCitations

2026-01-31

AI Summary

This study systematically evaluates the coverage of OpenCitations—an open scholarly infrastructure—for research outputs from six Italian universities and its potential to serve as an alternative to commercial bibliographic databases. By matching persistent identifiers (DOIs, PMIDs, and ISBNs) from publications recorded in institutional IRIS systems against OpenCitations Meta data, and complementing this with metadata reconciliation and citation linkage analysis, the research provides the first multi-institutional, CRIS-level quantification of OpenCitations’ coverage, benchmarked against Scopus and Web of Science. Findings indicate that OpenCitations covers, on average, over 40% of IRIS-indexed publications, demonstrating performance comparable to leading commercial databases overall. However, significant gaps remain in its coverage of monographs and critical editions in the humanities and social sciences, highlighting current limitations and key areas for future enhancement.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Linked Open Data, Knowledge Graphs & KB Completion
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Querying, indexing, and retrieval in Web-related graphs

Abstract

Recent initiatives advocating responsible, transparent research assessment have intensified the call to use open research information rather than proprietary databases. This study evaluates the coverage and citation representation of publications recorded in the Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), all instances of the IRIS software platform, of six Italian universities within OpenCitations, a community-owned open infrastructure. Using persistent identifiers (DOIs, PMIDs, and ISBNs) specified in the IRIS installations involved, we matched the publications recorded in OpenCitations Meta and extracted the related citation links from the OpenCitations Index. Results show that OpenCitations covers, on average, over 40% of IRIS publications, which is quantitatively comparable to those reported by Scopus and Web of Science in another study. However, gaps persist, particularly for publication types prevalent in the Social Sciences and Humanities, such as monographs and critical editions. Overall, the findings demonstrate the growing maturity of OpenCitations and, more broadly, of Open Science infrastructures as viable alternatives as sources of research information, while highlighting areas where further metadata enrichment and interoperability efforts are needed.

Problem

• OpenCitations
• research assessment
• publication coverage
• open science infrastructures
• bibliographic metadata

Innovation

• OpenCitations
• research assessment
• open science infrastructure
• publication coverage
• persistent identifiers