A grey zone for bibliometrics: publications indexed in Web of Science as anonymous

Abstract

Publications without authorship information have been indexed as anonymous in the Web of Science database over the years. However, discussions on this subject have not been sufficiently addressed in the scholarly literature. Since bibliometrics studies are widely used for bibliometricians, scientific disciplines, science policy, and management, missing significant data as authorship metadata characterizes a gray zone that directly impacts these three components, and by extension, for bibliometrics and scientometrics. With a data collection performed at Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC), 1,420,842 documents under "anonymous" authorship from 1900 to 2021 were retrieved, which accounted for 1.5% of the total documents indexed in the WoSCC. The publication data such as yearly growth of research publications, document type, language, productive research areas, and other bibliometric indicators were analyzed. The findings showed that in absolute numbers, a considerable growth of anonymous publications between 1996 and 2009, and there was a downward trend after that. However, this increase has not been proportional to the growth in the total number of publications indexed in the WoSCC. Articles, editorial materials, and news items were the top three document types among the WoSCC-indexed publications as anonymous. This study also finds two main scenarios of indexing publications as anonymous. The first is associated with the historical context of scholarly communication and practices that persist. The second is characterized by indexing persistent problems. This study suggests minimizing the error in databases, enabling an error-free indexing system and accurate bibliometrics studies.

From criminal interrogations to investigative interviews: a bibliometric study

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Can the principle of the ‘right to be forgotten’ be applied to academic publishing? Probe from the perspective of personal rights, archival science, open science and post‐publication peer review

“…The difficulty of ensuring complete anonymization in the modern era of big data can put an end to the centuries‐old history of using pseudonyms in scholarly communications and preserving the anonymity of authors. A scientist might not always be able to maintain their anonymity, such as whistleblowers, and anonymous scientists can be relatively easily unmasked, and information about their real identity linked to a pseudonym can quickly spread on the Internet and be stored in many databases, such as the Web of Science (WoS; Shamsi et al, 2022). Can a scientist, under the RTBF, demand the return of their anonymity, or is this prerogative of researchers a thing of the past?…”

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