Analysing the coverage of the University of Bologna’s bibliographic and citation metadata in OpenCitations collections

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 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 from IRIS and OpenCitations, creating novel datasets for analysis. Our findings reveal that only 36% of IRIS is covered in OpenCitations, with journal articles exhibiting the highest coverage. We identified 5,129,406 citation links pointing to UNIBO IRIS publications. From a purely quantitative perspective, comparing our results with broader proprietary services such as Scopus and Web of Science reveals comparable coverage in the number of IRIS bibliographic resources included across the systems analysed (OpenCitations, Scopus, and Web of Science), as well as in the number of citations they receive.