Research Impact: Start here: Different types of databases

Reports from Pure are only as accurate as the data being entered into Pure. Only entered publications will appear in Pure reports and so it is the researchers' responsibility to make sure that their publication lists in Pure are complete and accurate.

work on your profile or public view of your profile

Orcid is not a database in itself, but links the other databases on an individual author basis (if allowed by the author).

OpenAlex is a database that harvests from various other databases, Orcid among others. Thus if you are poorly represented in Scopus/WoS, try looking for your research in numbers in OpenAlex.

The databases Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) (access via the library database list) index a large number of primarily English language journals and thus contain millions of research articles. But not all. This means that the number of publications recorded in PURE may not be identical to the number of publications in WoS or Scopus for a given author. This is because of the criteria for indexing journals and publication types of Clarivate Analytics and Elsevier who own WoS and Scopus respectively.

The two databases contain mainly journal articles and review articles, while books and book chapters are poorly represented. The number of citations and thus the h-index will most likely suffer from missing papers. This scewed coverage will hurt the humanities and social sciences more than the natural sciences and medicine, because of the differences in the publications pattern. Books are much more prevalent in the humanities than in medicine.

Google Scholar is also able to calculate h-indexes and citation scores, and it indexes far more than WoS and Scopus. The downside to this is that Google Scholar indexes perhaps too much non-scholarly publications which will muddy the waters and yield bloated indicators.