A Study of References in Russian Citing Publications (Sources) on Data from the Web of Science Core Collection

Abstract—

The article presents the results of the first statistical analysis of an array of references (about 30 million) from Russian research articles, reviews, conference proceedings, and monograph chapters published in 1980–2020. The references are processed (restructured and identified) to make them machine-readable and to match them to cited publications. It is found that the content of the bibliographic description fields is not uniform. Methods for eliminating this ambiguity are proposed. Changes in the length of reference lists over time, the completeness of data in fields containing bibliographic descriptions of references, the dependence of successful identification of references on the database and the time of publication of the citing publication, and cross-identification of source publications and references are discussed.