Analysing the coverage of the University of Bologna's publication metadata in an existing source of open research information

Abstract: This study focuses on analysing the coverage of publications' metadata available in the Current Research Information System (CRIS) infrastructure of the University of Bologna (UNIBO), implemented by the IRIS platform, within an authoritative source of open research information, i.e. OpenCitations. The analysis considers data regarding the publication entities alongside the citation links. We precisely quantify the proportion of UNIBO IRIS publications included in OpenCitations, examine their types, and evaluate the number of citations in OpenCitations that involve IRIS publications. Our methodology filters and transforms data dumps of IRIS and OpenCitations, creating novel datasets used for the analysis. Our findings reveal that only 37.7% of IRIS is covered in OpenCitations, with journal articles exhibiting the highest coverage. We identified 4,290,096 citation links pointing to UNIBO IRIS publications. From a purely quantitative perspective, comparing our results with broader proprietary services like Scopus and Web of Science reveals a small gap in the average number of citations per bibliographic resource. However, further analysis with updated data is required to support this speculation.