Online Databases and Repositories

Concept

Scopus (Elsevier, 2004) is a large abstract and citation database that supplies CiteScore, SJR, SNIP and author profiles. Web of Science (Clarivate, formerly the Institute for Scientific Information) has the Core Collection of SCIE, SSCI, AHCI and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), and publishes the Journal Citation Reports with the impact factor. Google Scholar is free but not curated. Dimensions links publications with grants and patents. In India, INFLIBNET’s IndCat is a union catalogue of library holdings, and the UGC-CARE list (Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics, introduced around 2018–19) was created to identify quality journals, though UGC’s journal-quality policy has been revised, so check the current position.

Concept

Subject databases give deeper coverage in a field. PubMed/MEDLINE (National Library of Medicine) covers biomedicine; ERIC covers education; PsycINFO (APA) covers psychology; EconLit covers economics; IEEE Xplore covers engineering and electronics; the ACM Digital Library covers computing; MathSciNet covers mathematics; SciFinder covers chemistry; and the Cochrane Library holds systematic reviews in health. JSTOR is an archive of humanities and social science journals with older issues. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses collects theses, and EBSCOhost and ProQuest are platforms hosting many databases. arXiv (physics, mathematics, computer science), SSRN (social sciences) and RePEc (economics) provide preprints and working papers.

Concept

ORCID gives each researcher a persistent identifier that distinguishes them from others with the same name and links to their works. Other profiles are Web of Science ResearcherID, Scopus Author ID, Google Scholar profile and INFLIBNET’s Vidwan. Crossref is the main registration agency for scholarly DOIs and DataCite registers DOIs for datasets. The Directory of Open Access Journals vets OA journals, and the UGC-CARE list was India’s quality list. Access initiatives include e-ShodhSindhu, NDLI, IRINS and, from 2025, ONOS (One Nation One Subscription), which seeks a single national subscription to major international journals for public institutions.

Concept

Research data repositories store datasets and make them citable. Examples are Zenodo, Figshare, Dryad, Harvard Dataverse, OSF, Mendeley Data and ICPSR for social science data; in India the Open Government Data platform is data.gov.in, working under the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy of 2012. The FAIR principles (Wilkinson and colleagues, 2016) say that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Good practice includes a data management plan, rich metadata (for example Dublin Core), a persistent identifier such as a DOI, and a clear licence (CC0 or CC BY).

Concept

Metrics operate at three levels. Journal-level measures are the impact factor, CiteScore, SJR, SNIP and Eigenfactor. Author-level measures include the h-index (Hirsch, 2005), the g-index (Leo Egghe) and the i10-index (Google Scholar). Article-level measures include citation counts, field-weighted citation impact and altmetrics (online attention such as news, social media and policy mentions, shown by Altmetric and PlumX). Misuse of metrics is criticised in the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA, 2012) and the Leiden Manifesto (2015), which urge that research be judged on its content and not on journal metrics alone.