No abstract

The Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) was created recently, in 2015, but few assessments of its journal coverage have been made. The present study tries to fill that gap by comparing its coverage with that of other international abstracting and indexing (A&I) databases. Using this measure, it is feasible to benchmark this index against the other citation indexes for acceptance criteria. We analysed 6,296 ESCI‐indexed journals, 8,889 Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), 3,258 Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), 1,784 Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), and 22,749 Scopus journals as indexed in July 2017 to determine their inclusion in 105 databases. We found that 19.3% of the ESCI journals are not covered by any other A&I databases, a high figure compared with only 0.5% SCIE, 0.3% SSCI, 0.3% AHCI, and 5.5% Scopus journals. This low coverage suggests that the selection criteria for ESCI journals are not consistent with the overall trend in the other classical citation indexes.

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The interdisciplinary nature of library and information science (LIS) research has been highlighted for some time now. The term "interdisciplinary" is used primarily in the LIS literature as a general concept with different meanings that refer either to the coexistence of researchers from different scientific fields or to cross-disciplinary collaboration expressed in the form of coauthorship. This study analyses the disciplinary profile of LIS researchers with a view to ascertaining the actual level of cross-disciplinary collaboration and identifying all fields involved. Because of the complexity of identifying accurate affiliations at knowledge area level, the study was limited to authors from France, Germany, Spain and the UK. This analysis of authorship affiliation was performed based on research published in LIS serial titles indexed in Scopus during the 2010-2017 period. A rigorous and laborious process of identifying author affiliations was carried out. This involved checking the authorship of each paper and complementing this with information from websites, scientific social networks and other research endeavours whenever ambiguous situations arose. We observed that LIS departments produce barely a third of the research published in serial titles in the LIS subject category. Cross-disciplinary collaboration among all of the scientific fields involved is low, and even lower in LIS than in other fields. The low level of cross-disciplinary collaboration in LIS contradicts the interdisciplinary nature of LIS highlighted in the literature.