Mind the Gap: Understanding Coverage Breaks of Newly Launched Engineering and Computer Science Journals in Core Databases

Abstract

Journal coverage is an important factor to consider when evaluating a database. In this study, we counted the number of articles (including early access articles) in newly-launched journals (2018-2022) from two major association publishers in engineering and computer science: the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). We then compared these numbers with the number of articles from these journals in Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection, Scopus, and Google Scholar (GS). Results indicated that GS had higher percentages for coverage for all the journals that were assessed and outperformed WOS and Scopus in terms of how fast newly-launched journals were indexed. Findings from this study will help librarians evaluate each database in reference, instruction, and collection development.