On the correction of “old” omitted citations by bibliometric databases

Omitted citations – i.e., missing links between a cited paper and the corresponding citing papers – are the main consequence of several bibliometric-database errors. To reduce these errors, databases may undertake two actions: (i) improving the control of the (new) papers to be indexed, i.e., limiting the introduction of “new” dirty data, and (ii) detecting and correcting errors in the papers already indexed by the database, i.e., cleaning “old” dirty data. The latter action is probably more complicated, as it requires the application of suitable error-detection procedures to a huge amount of data. Based on an extensive sample of scientific papers in the Engineering-Manufacturing field, this study focuses on old dirty data in the Scopus and WoS databases. To this purpose, a recent automated algorithm for estimating the omitted-citation rate of databases is applied to the same sample of papers, but in three different-time sessions. A database’s ability to clean the old dirty data is evaluated considering the variations in the omitted-citation rate from session to session. The major outcomes of this study are that: (i) both databases slowly correct old omitted citations, and (ii) a small portion of initially corrected citations can surprisingly come off from databases over time.